By Dolores Quintana
Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning is a ridiculously entertaining action film with a core of what humanity needs now. It is filled with tension, amazing stunts, and heart. Just when you think it can’t go harder, it does. Non-stop plot-driven rug pulls with a top-flight cast are its prime directive, and it succeeds.
The synopsis is very simple, but ultimately fitting for the film: Our lives are the sum of our choices.
The film stars Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman and Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, with Rolf Saxon, Lucy Tulugarjuk and what a cast they assembled for this entry in the series.
Longtime cast members continue to do their solid standard of work, Tom Cruise just can’t stop doing stunts that bend your mind a little bit, and the newer members acquit themselves more than admirably. I must say that it is a pleasure to see Esai Morales finally get the leading role in a blockbuster film that he has always deserved. Morales seems to really be enjoying himself in the role, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie, who has made the last three films in the series, has taken the series in possibly the most unexpected direction, a philosophical one. The central theme of the film is all of the choices that our lives are made of and how they are all intertwined. For the first time, he co-wrote the film with Erik Jendresen.
Selfish people do selfish things and cause chaos and death out of greed and the desire for control. While the film continues the usual mythmaking about Ethan Hunt being the one man who can save the world, his conscience, and his friends’ and allies’ ability to trust one another, make sacrifices, and work together become the solid support that makes Hunt’s acrobatic heroism work. It finally admits that it is the team that has a chance to course correct humanity’s fate. Without their individual talents and strengths, in tandem, the world is lost.
We are nothing without each other.
I was surprised to find that the adversary in this film, as in the previous installment, Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning, is a sentient AI called the Entity. This is where the film proves to have more in common with the Terminator series than any other type of action film. Yes, it does, in particular, Terminator 2.
It seems that the collective consciousness is at work again, because M:I TFR is a cautionary tale of the dangers of AI. I have always believed that artists feel the world’s problems coming from some way off. They give us warnings, time and again, and I think that Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning does so too. AI is an existential threat to artists and to humanity itself, and in the film, it is an enemy that sees no value in human beings and uses us as pawns to achieve its aims. It hits, perhaps, a little too close to home with the current events of 2025.
Cinematographer Fraser Taggart did a very good job with a film that has elaborate action sequences flying at the camera for most of its running time. It is sleek, but has an edge of chaos and imperfection that suits the film’s themes.
Composers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey have created a solid score that seems to interweave components of mournful classical pieces, which I would probably have to give the film another watch to identify, as well as the original and classic Lalo Schifrin theme song. I think the classical piece might be Handel’s Sarabande in D minor and /or Mozart’s Lachrimosa.
Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning is a howling and invigorating action movie whose most valuable aspect is the humanity at its core. It has the same exhilarating feel of putting the pedal to the metal on an empty highway. It takes some time in the first hour to build character relationships between gunfights and brawls and explore humanity’s best and worst aspects, but it is the character building that makes the final action-driven act work. It has some lovely surprises and tragedies to contend with, so it is a bit more emotional than I expected from the series, but it isn’t stingy with the over-the-top set pieces that the fans of the franchise expect.
It’s also funnier than I thought it would be, which is what won me over. For all of the sturm and drang, it has a sense of humor about itself and an empathy that a lot of blockbusters don’t have. It is much more well-rounded and not simply a vehicle for razmatazz and eye-popping stunts. It is perfect in its seeming imperfections, much like our species.
I’m much more enthusiastic about this film than I have been about any in the series since the first Brian De Palma film. It’s got more depth than a lot of the early sequels, but barrels through the screen in IMAX in a completely satisfying way. It’s not action simply for action’s sake. The film’s humanity drives home the message, we have the choice, and that will determine our future.
