From 5/12/2025 press screening:
The fate of the world and billions of lives… in a blink of an eye.
That sums up the plot of “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning,” a direct continuation of “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.” And that blink of an eye? It’s in a literal sense of the word.
To refresh, in 'Dead Reckoning,' superspy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, “Top Gun"series, "Edge of Tomorrow," "Oblivion") and his team (tech duo Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luthor Stickell (Ving Rhames), former MI6 operative and sharpshooter Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), and scrappy yet sophisticated pickpocketer, Grace (Hayley Atwell), are battling a pervasively invisible enemy, Entity. Entity is a sentient artificial intelligence that has penetrated social media, communication, financial, banking, military and security systems at a global level.
Entity corrupts and manipulates data, distorting truth, creating or erasing history - for anything digital or electronic, which is anywhere and everywhere these days. The sought-after solution is a two-part key, which would unlock the source code, and whoever has both pieces would have the ultimate power over the world. The faceless AI manifests into a terrorist from Ethan's past, Gabriel (Esai Morales).
In “Final Reckoning,” Ethan is joined by new team members Paris (Pom Klementieff) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). The storyline gets convoluted with tons of moving components and parts of Ethan’s past, which in some ways, trying to connect and tie loose ends from moments with characters from the first film nearly 30 years ago and somewhere in between. It includes a lengthy cameo, montages and flashbacks to those secretive and explosive events from then to the present time.
The present time involves globe-spanning herculean efforts to get to and unlock the AI source code in a hard drive entombed inside a sunken Russian Sevastopol submarine in the Arctic Ocean, while Entity gradually but rapidly is taking control of countries’ nuclear arsenal and ready to launch them for total annihilation, as well as tussling with powerful people with incongruous interests wanting to wrap their arms around Entity.
The bottom line comes down to this: the team, frenemies and real enemies, government officials – U.S. President (Angela Bassett, “Black Panther" series), Kittridge (Henry Czerny), Briggs (Shea Whigham), and military officers are faced with conflicting choices regarding what to do with the villainous and infectious AI – destroy, control or contain.
Destroy means destruction of the cyberspace and the interconnected world as we know it. Control means putting unlimited, utter power of the world on the hands of the fallible few (or one individual). Contain means impossibly racing against time-bomb ticking Entity and risking billions of lives. At one point, there are only four countries left with their own nuclear missiles and Entity is on track to quickly take hold of every single one of them.
The final reckoning journey takes the team to contrasting landscapes of the frozen Behring Sea and stunning South African gorges and sea cliffs down to a doomsday server bunker in an underground cave.
There’s a coordinates conjecture, AI-trapping plan, poison pill of a computer virus, a source code hard drive and containment device, nuclear missiles ready to fire, potential pre-emptive strikes, explosives ready to explode, onerous wires to be cut, mercenary shootouts and sneaky close-quarter hand combats, dog-sledding across a frozen tundra, navy carrier jet mission, deep diving into a collapsing sunken submarine, ice fishing out expedition, in-between-wheels climbing and wing-walking of biplanes, as well as life threatening injuries. Yep, it’s a lot!
It's not always easy to keep up with and decipher every element, but the movie does a tremendous job in lining up key pieces, crafting tension and explanation of complex scenarios with complicated consequences that make them seem real and plausible (by Mission Impossible standards). The juxtaposition of critical scenes are effectively tensed, portraying characters one after another or side-by-side completing sentences and actions simultaneously.
Especially on IMAX, Cruise’s dare-to-die stunts with the submarine and biplanes are breathlessly out of this world. The seafloor submarine escape is claustrophobically suffocating and testing the human limit underwater. At 8,000 feet in the air and 140 mph wind without CGI, the blow-by-blow, biplane aerial acrobat and dogged pursuit are clearly shot, capturing heart-stopping contortions, and surprisingly, with situational humor.
If there’s any actioner where every second counts, this is it. Not just every second, but with precision in almost every scene. And with ‘Final Reckoning’ being billed as possibly the final installment and knowing that not everyone may survive adds to the emotional stake. Call it a calling or destiny. These people truly live and die in the shadows, for those they hold close, and those they never meet.
By any standard, there will never be another super series franchise like this. More than a cinematic spectacle, Cruise chiefly has made it iconic and irreplaceable.
“Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning” is both thrillingly taut and sprawling, packed with high-stake suspense and intensity, and connected with threads of nostalgia. A crashing force to be reckoned with and exhilarating to the hilt, you won’t be able to exhale until the last minute.
