Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)

It was always going to be an explosive ending for Ethan Hunt- the only question was could The Final Reckoning live up to the insane standards set by Dead Reckoning's (2023) train set piece finale (and everything that came before it).

Reviews have been surprisingly mixed considering the franchise has aged like a fine wine, and although 2015's Rogue Nation remains my personal favourite, the films have got more and more ambitious as we've gone on.

Whilst Dead Reckoning left a lot to tie up, the film cracks on immediately (despite what some critics have claimed) rejoining Benji (Simon Pegg) Luther (Ving Rhames) and of course Ethan. The world has gone down the toilet and the A.I Entity has begun to take control of the world's nuclear weapons while the evil Gabriel (Esai Morales) does the A.I's bidding-and world governments are powerless to stop it.

It's up to the IMF (which now of course boasts Hayley Atwell's Grace) to somehow take down both Gabriel and the seemingly unstoppable force of A.I before it destroys the world.

What makes The Final Reckoning so satisfying is naturally its insane action- but also the way it calls back to and ties in old stories from the series. There are so many occasions where franchises have attempted to this and it's fallen flat- as much as I love the Bond franchise, the way Spectre (2015) tried to tie up the previous three Craig films and make it all one interlocking story didn't really work- but Mission: Impossible uses some very clever story lines to bring everything in line. Remember what the Rabbit's Foot from M:I III (2006) was? Exactly- we never found out.

Old faces also come out of the woodwork in ways that all work and link perfectly as well as nostalgically, and once you get to the truly insane final third, you're hooked. That's not to say The Final Reckoning doesn't have its flaws. As much as I loved Dead Reckoning, the tone it took removed some of the humour from the previous three outings, and didn't really contain a sequence that fused that amusement and tension. For example, the terrific sequence in the Kremlin from Ghost Protocol, the Opera scene in Rogue Nation, or the astonishing set piece in Paris from Fallout (2018).

The Final Reckoning sadly doesn't reinstate any of these; in fact it doesn't have anything on land that resembles Dead Reckoning's most enjoyable action set piece; the Abu Dhabi airport chase using all manner of fake out A.I technology put to use by Luther.

What it does contain however, is the heart stopping submarine sequence- something that has been on the cards since the cold opening of Dead Reckoning when the Russian sub, the Sevastopol, is hacked by the Entity and sends the crew to their watery graves. It's every bit as exquisite as you might have hoped for. And of course, the bat-shit crazy biplane finale, with Cruise once again insisting on risking death to get these scenes filmed properly.

What the final (if indeed it is to be so) M:I film also brings to the table, is some genuine jeopardy over who lives and who dies. Part Seven killed off a major character in a move I didn't see coming, and throughout The Final Reckoning you honestly don't know who's going to be around by its conclusion. Although the last two films have lacked a real life super villain to rival previous films, the Entity is such an effective big-bad because we're now in a world that has moved on so prominently in terms of technology since these two films were shot- it just comes across as scarily prescient. That very much works in the film's favour, with everyone looking at the screen thinking the same thing. We're probably not far off this. The Final Reckoning (probably) brings down the curtain on what has been a stupefying feat of cinema for nearly thirty years. Each entry as upped the anti in ways you can barely fathom, and Cruise has made the entire thing his own. It's a shame that it's the end for these characters- especially Atwell's Grace who's proved a more than worthy addition to the IMF, and would have been welcomed back with open arms for further instalments. It might not end with Mission: Impossible's finest film, but it goes out on a high- thanks to Christopher McQuarrie, Tom Cruise and the rest of them performing one last quite extraordinary dance. 8.0/10