Crew
Director – Christopher McQuarrie, Screenplay – Erik Jendresen & Christopher McQuarrie, Producers – Tom Cruise & Christopher McQuarrie, Photography – Fraser Taggart, Music – Max Aruj & Alfie Godfrey, Visual Effects Supervisor – Alex Wuttke, Visual Effects/Animation – Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Jeff Sutherland), Visual Effects – beloFX (Supervisors – Huw J. Evans, Paul Franklin & Joel Green), Bluebolt (Supervisor – Tiago Faria), Cheap Shot VFX (Supervisors – Ben Perriott & Jon Van Hoey Smith), lola | VFX (Supervisor – Jeremiah Sweeney), The Mill, MPC (Supervisor – Kristin Hall), One of Us (Supervisor – Ola Pellerud Hamletsen), Rodeo FX (Supervisors – Arnaud Brisebois & Charles Labbe), Territory Studio (Supervisor – Morti Biran) & Untold Studios (Supervisor – Mike Bell), Special Effects Supervisor – Ian Lowe, Production Design – Gary Freeman. Production Company – Paramount/Skydance.
Cast
Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Hayley Atwell (Grace), Simon Pegg (Benji Dunn), Ving Rhames (Luther Stickell), Esai Morales (Gabriel), Pom Klementieff (Paris), Angela Bassett (President Erika Sloane), Shea Whigham (Briggs), Greg Tarzan Davis (Degas), Rolf Saxon (William Donloe), Henry Czerny (Eugene Kittridge), Nick Offerman (General Sidney), Tramell Tillman (Captain Bledsoe), Holt McCallany (Serling), Janet McTeer (Walters), Hannah Waddingham (Admiral Neely), Charles Parnell (Richards), Mark Gatiss (Angstrom), Lucy Tulugarjuk (Tapeesa)
Plot
Unleashed, the A.I. known as The Entity has wreaked havoc around the world, creating a cult and having taken over the nuclear launch facilities of several countries. Ethan and the IMF team are on the trail of Gabriel who has taken one of the keys and seeks to turn The Entity to his own uses. They set out to obtain the other key, the Podkova, from the sunken Russian submarine Sevastopol, which involves Ethan making a dive into the collapsing wreck in Arctic waters. As US President Erika Sloane prepares to launch a deadly nuclear attack against the other countries taken over by The Entity, Ethan pleads for time. Ethan heads to a meeting with Gabriel at The Doomsday Vault in South Africa, a repository of all knowledge where he hatches an elaborate plan to trick Gabriel into activating a key that has a poison pill that will trap The Entity.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was the eighth of the Mission Impossible films. The series began nearly thirty years earlier with Mission: Impossible (1996), a big screen remake of the popular spy caper tv series Mission: Impossible (1966-73). These became a series of sequels for star Tom Cruise who returned for Mission: Impossible II (2000), Mission: Impossible III (2006), Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011). Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), the latter three under director Christopher McQuarrie, who returns to the series here. The Final Reckoning is Dead Reckoning: Part II by any other name but the Part 2 aspect has been dropped for reasons unknown (maybe it didn’t go down well with test audiences?).
The Final Reckoning also feels as though it is taking the ‘final’ part of the title literally and is intended as Tom Cruise’s last outing in the franchise. With Cruise turning 63 just after the film premiered, you get the feeling that he is aging out of being able to do the intensely physically demanding stuntwork that he has boasted about doing in person on the other films. It is also a film that homages the other films in the series far more than any of the others do. The opening scenes and credits contain a montage of flashbacks from the rest of the series. There are callbacks to the other films where we learn that Shea Whigham is the son of Jon Voigt’s Jim Phelps from the first film and where the Rabbit’s Foot from Mission: Impossible III is retconned from being a virus to part of the code for The Entity. There is also the return of Rolf Saxon playing the now retired version of the CIA operative who was encountered during the drop-in sequence in the first film.
The Final Reckoning has also suffered epic bloat. It is the longest of the Mission: Impossible films at 170 minutes and with a budget around $300 million, making it among the most expensive films ever made. It gives Ethan Hunt the highest stakes he has ever fought for – the fate of the entire world as he faces a rogue A.I. and nuclear annihilation. The opening scenes are filled with monumental tributes to the greatness of his character and the number of lives he has saved.
Dead Reckoning was the finest of all the Mission: Impossible films to date. It introduced a fascinatingly original nemesis – an A.I. that could think of every move in advance and predict all possible courses of action. The action scenes were epical in nature. The disappointment of The Final Reckoning is that it is far less than the promise of the continuation of that. Here the A.I. has simply taken over the world and control of nuclear arsenals around the world and is now threatening the USA. It also seems to have inspired some cult and rioting in the streets, where some people we meet are fanatically dedicated and will kill for it. (However, we never find out what it is about the A.I. that has created a cult and why people are so obsessed with it). There are only brief glimmers of the premise in the first film where it can predict all courses of action and they have to outsmart it. And that feels like a watering down of the premise – or a failure to know where to take the film.
The other issue one might say is that The Final Reckoning is on the slow side in terms of the high bar that Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie have established through the preceding films. With the exception of the climactic scene, there is nothing here that compares with the motorcycles chases and bathroom fistfights in Fallout, the dive into the nuclear plant in Rogue Nation or the handcuffed flight through the street and climactic train sequence in Dead Reckoning. There is a long wait to get to the sequence where Tom Cruise ventures down into the collapsing submarine and makes a death-defying return to the surface. This is a fine sequence but suffers what all underwater action scenes do – it is slow moving.
The Final Reckoning does pick up for an epic sized climactic fight. This is perhaps rather funny for the number of crises that it manages to have happening all at once – there is the need to invite The Entity into the Doomsday Vault’s servers but snatch it out in a thumb drive in the nanosecond before it activates the nuclear launch codes; Benji is near-fatally wounded and needs emergency surgery and keeps passing out while giving key technical instructions; three others are attempting to disarm a thermonuclear warhead that has been left in the cave outside and have seconds to run to safety of the vault door; Tom Cruise is hanging off the outside of a biplane and trying to get the key back from Gabriel and then bailing out of the plane in a burning parachute; all at the same time as seconds count down to the president launching nuclear missiles at the rest of the world. Phew!
Trailer here