In the enormously unlikely event that you have, over the past 30 years (!), failed to encounter a Mission: Impossible film then fear not as you approach what looks like the last in the sequence.
The bizarrely misguided opening 45 minutes to Final Reckoning – premiering with much hoopla at the 2025 Cannes film festival – comprises a relentless summary of the previous episode and extended farewell to the six films that preceded it. We see flashbacks to Jon Voight, Michelle Monaghan and half a dozen other former cast members. We get to see the version of Tom Cruise who, unlike the current incarnation, doesn’t appear to be wearing a Beatles wig.
All that is bearable enough. Less enjoyable is the exhausting reiteration of the dilemma Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and the M:I team now face. Angela Bassett returns as President Sloane to tell him – how could he not have noticed? – that a malign digital entity known as, umm, “the Entity” has infected the world’s computers and is planning to launch nuclear mayhem.
Half a dozen synonyms for apocalypse are spoken, including (poor Angela) “the end of the world as we know it”. Apparently the source code to the Entity is on a sunken submarine and …
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Stop talking to me! Nobody cares about the McGuffin. Stage a car chase on the Great Wall of China. Abseil down the Eiffel Tower. What do you think we’re paying you for?
It would be an exaggeration to suggest that an unforgivably sluggish opening kills the film. But, by the time we finally get Hunt into a diving suit and sink him to the floor of the north Pacific, quite a few cinemagoers will have checked out.
And that extended sequence is more of a technical achievement than a pulse accelerator. A good 60 years ago, in Thunderball, the Bond team accidentally demonstrated how difficult it is to maintain interest for underwater action sequences. Too murky. Too little access to the character’s face. It takes a long, long time for this M:I film to redeem itself with the biplane stunt you’ve seen on the poster.
All of which comes as a dispiriting surprise after the excellent Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. That film was zippy, irreverent and a good deal lighter on the unnecessary exposition. Mind you, as I noted at the time, at least one delightfully absurd stunt suggested the series was edging towards Roger Moore-era Bond.
Cruise is now a few years older than the Englishman was when he abandoned 007 in A View to a Kill – alas, the mop-top only ages Thomas – but, rather than embracing Mooreish camp, the closing film takes itself far too seriously.
There is nothing here to equal the wonderfully entertaining sequence in Part One that saw Cruise, handcuffed to Hayley Atwell, racing a yellow Fiat 500 through crowded Rome. We are too busy with the end of the world as we know it.
All those objections noted, it is only fair to acknowledge that a good deal of the suave mayhem Brian De Palma devised for the first film, in 1996, has survived into the second quarter of the 21st century.
When set beside the desperation of late Marvel, Mission: Impossible still delivers a palpable crunch in its violent setpieces. The series again confirms how, alongside the John Wick and Jason Bourne films, it has become one of three defining forces in contemporary action cinema. There is as much Buster Keaton in that late aerial sequence as there is James Bond.
Still, none of that quite justifies the length and lachrymosity of the farewell Final Reckoning stages for itself. Surviving characters hug and sob and wheeze at an international landmark. It could hardly be more formally sentimental if one of them were presented with an engraved carriage clock. Which is not to suggest I’m happy to see it go.
