'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' Is a Thrilling Love Letter to the Franchise

A few thoughts on the most recent reckoning.

Hey folks: It’s been a few weeks time since the last Decoding Everything update. There are good reasons for that — specifically, I’ve been dealing with some professional transitions, some family-related health issues, and then my own health issues when I got sick a couple weeks ago with some crippling bronchitis. But I’m now back in the chair and ready to talk about movies, TV, tech, and all the other stuff that is of interest to all of us.

Today, I’m sharing my non-spoilery thoughts on Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and in a few days you should expect an interview I did with the directors of Final Destination: Bloodlines, plus some dispatches from Cannes this year by

Stephen David Miller

. In the weeks ahead, there will be many posts on all the stuff releasing during the summer movie season, plus whatever else is on my mind. Thanks for sticking around!

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Zach Baron has a great new feature on the making of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning in the latest GQ and there are two anecdotes within that I think really illustrate where we are with the franchise at this point. In the first, writer/director Chris McQuarrie is discussing how Mission: Impossible scripts evolve dramatically, sometimes far into the production process:

Because of the constantly evolving nature of the Mission scripts, they usually shoot exposition in places they can return to—and not, for instance, on the top of a mountain. “Anytime you have big information scenes, anytime you have exposition, plot, you put them in small rooms, cars, phone booth, you put ’em into a place that you can easily repeat and go back to,” McQuarrie said, “because you’re always going to be changing the plot to accommodate the emotion, rather than the other way around.”

This seat-of-your-pants filmmaking style might sound like a panic attack waiting to happen for most people, but McQuarrie and star/producer Tom Cruise have been able to make it work for the last four Impossible films. Mostly.

While Rogue Nation and Fallout (the fifth and six entries, respectively) were great films that hung together well, the last film, Dead Reckoning, suffered from an episodic, disjointed feel, with an assortment of new characters that couldn’t carry the emotional heft of their predecessors (I wrote all about it here). It turns out that “finding the movie” as you go along doesn’t work super well when you need to shut down production multiple times due to COVID and one of your stars decides they want to spend a lot of time in metallic underground tubes instead of being in your franchise.

I’m pleased to report that The Final Reckoning, while far from perfect, has a much more cohesive feel to it than Dead Reckoning. Final Reckoning directly continues the events of its predecessor and finds Hunt hot on the trail of Gabriel, a representative of the super-powered world-ending AI only known as The Entity (Don’t worry — there’s plenty of exposition and flashbacks to get you up to speed if the plot details aren’t fresh in your mind). There’s a clear goal the characters are trying to achieve and Hunt proceeds in a methodical fashion towards that goal. Perhaps most importantly, one of the elements that made the Impossible films great — the sense that Hunt was part of a team working together, each of whom was contributing something unique — is finally back. Hunt’s team in this movie is a ragtag assemblage of characters who are rough around the edges but by the end of the movie, I was really rooting for them.

The second anecdote from the profile that sticks out:

In London, over dinner, I asked McQuarrie to walk me through the making of a single stunt in the newest Mission: Impossible film. In Final Reckoning there is a sequence in which Cruise hangs from the side of a biplane, before leaping onto a second biplane, all in midair. An image from this scene is on the poster; pieces of it are in the film’s trailer. (This is the core of the Mission appeal: The thing the filmmakers care about most is the thing audiences care about most too. The movie is the marketing; the marketing is the movie.) The practice of going out onto the wing of a flying airplane is called wing walking, and that is who Cruise went to first: some wing walkers. “They said, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” McQuarrie told me. “And Tom said, ‘I want to be between the wings of the plane holding on to the tension wires, and I want to be in zero G between the wings.’ And wing walkers who do this for living said, ‘That will never happen. You can never do that.’ And Tom said, ‘All right, well, thank you very much for your time.’ ” And he and McQuarrie went and found some different wing walkers.

What’s been true for the last few Impossible films is that you really get the sense that Tom Cruise is trying to push The Limits, in every sense of the term. He’s pushing the limits of what a human being can be physically capable of, dangling off the sides of buildings and airplanes and submerging himself underwater in feats that would make you think he was adrenaline junkie with a death wish if he didn’t have a camera pointed at him. But he’s also pushing the limits of action cinema. Capturing all this stuff on camera requires the latest filmmaking technology so that audiences can witness it in glorious IMAX.

The Final Reckoning is 171 minutes long and it takes about half of that runtime for it to really get going. There is endless exposition in the opening half, with many scenes of many characters at long tables explaining exactly Cruise and team are trying to even accomplish. These early acts are rough and the movie is frequently verbose and ponderous — tough to follow, and even harder to enjoy. But when the action finally kicks in during the second half, the results are spectacular. There are several major set pieces in this film that not only qualify as the best in the franchise; they may be among the best ever put to film. And there, through it all, is Cruise, trying to show us something we’ve never seen before and ultimately succeeding.

Beyond serving as a Tom Cruise Action Set Piece Delivery Machine, The Final Reckoning also makes a closing argument for the franchise. To that end, there are copious references to the events and characters of previous films and flashbacks showing the sum of Ethan Hunt’s actions, posing the implicit question: What did it all mean? While that type of fan service-y behavior usually annoys me, the way that McQuarrie has figured out how to integrate previous films into this one is…kind of genius? These aren’t just passing, disposable shout-outs. They are deep, richly integrated callbacks that give additional emotional resonance to events that have occurred in previous films. I won’t spoil them here but I suspect how well you enjoy these callbacks will have a huge bearing on how much you like the film overall.

While Cruise has said he’d like to keep making Mission: Impossible films into his 80s, the way some of the storylines wrap up here and the fact that this movie is called The Final Reckoning do make it seem like this might be Cruise’s swan song for the franchise. There’s a funereal vibe to these proceedings, as though the filmmakers know this might be the last bite they have at this particular apple. If so, it will have been a worthy and memorable one which successfully honors how Cruise and his collaborators have done the Impossible and helped shaped action cinema over the course of the past several decades. It was a mission I was pleased to accept.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning will be in theaters everywhere on May 23rd.

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My Updated Mission: Impossible Movie Rankings

1. Mission: Impossible - Fallout

2. M:I 1

3. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

4. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

5. M:I 3

6. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

7. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1

8. M:I 2

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The 2025 Summer Movie Wager

Every year on the Filmcast, we try to guess what the top 10 movies of the summer will be by domestic box office, and every year, at least a few of us get things hilariously wrong. I’m sure this year will be no different. The episode is called The Summer Movie Wager and it’s great fun.

You can listen to our episode here or watch the madness below.

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Other Stuff David Chen Has Been Making

• It’s been awhile and I’ve published too many things to link here, but the biggest thing I want to call your attention to is that we’re now doing TV recaps over at

  Decoding TV
  . Subscribe (it’s free!) and get our wonderful coverage of shows like Andor and The Last of Us. Matt Goldberg is writing about The Last of Us Season 2 and here’s Dan Gvozden’s recap of the final batch of episodes of Andor season 2.

Andor S2E10-12 Review | "Make It Stop," "Who Else Knows?" "Jedha, Kyber, Erso"

• To accompany your reading, YouTuber/Filmmaker Patrick Willems and I recently recorded a four-part series reviewing the new season of Andor. Check it out on the Decoding TV podcast or on YouTube.

• On the Decoding TV podcast, Patrick Klepek and I are covering The Last of Us and The Rehearsal, the latter of which has given us some of the most unhinged TV moments in recent memory.

• ALSO on Decoding TV: Jessie Earl and I recently discussed every episode of the new season of Black Mirror.

• [PAID ONLY] I’m starting a new podcast series on my Patreon page about some big potential life changes coming up for me. You can listen to the first episode here.