Tom Cruise will break your heart in the last chapter of his celebrated espionage franchise, a self-reflexive, minor-key movie that bids farewell to Ethan Hunt and the gang. By Yasmin Omar
In 1986, at the age of 61, the blue-eyed heartthrob Paul Newman reprised his iconic role as the hustling pool player ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson for the legacy sequel The Color of Money. By this time, Newman had settled into the old-man phase of his career, slackening his youthful vitality and allowing himself to appear past his prime. The text of the movie demarcates this shift, with Eddie being outmanoeuvred by a smart-mouthed young buck. That young buck was Tom Cruise. Now a year older than Newman was in ’86, Cruise has resolutely refused to transition into Fast Eddie parts. In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning he plays the heroic, world-saving spy Ethan Hunt – who’s supple enough to pummel his adversaries, astute enough to foil their evil plans – for the eighth time. It’s also the last time.
The closing film in any franchise carries a lot on its shoulders. It must consolidate the legacy of the series as a whole, and The Final Reckoning wears this responsibility heavily. The stakes have never been higher. The Entity, the sentient AI that was the big bad of the previous instalment, has spent the ensuing two months wreaking immense global havoc, resulting in martial law and civilian distrust of technology. The AI has been taking control of each nation’s nuclear-weapons cache one by one – as indicated by several alarming shots of flag-emblazoned warheads poised to attack – and is plotting the annihilation of the human race. The mission Ethan and his team have chosen to accept is finding The Entity’s original source code to bring it down. Their chances of success are estimated at one in a trillion.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
There have, of course, always been threats in Mission: Impossible, but none quite this grave. In many ways, The Final Reckoning is less an action movie, more a disaster movie. Where worst-case scenarios used to be implied, here they’re visualised with apocalyptic projections of the Hollywood sign burning, the Eiffel Tower felled, Big Ben brought to rubble. This creates a surprisingly melancholy tone. The lightness that enlivened the other films is all but absent (although new castmember Tramell Tillman, of Severance fame, delivers lines with his signature sly amusement). We only get one goofy mask reveal; Vanessa Kirby, and her minxy humour, inexplicably don’t return; and even Simon Pegg’s Benji, the franchise’s erstwhile comic sidekick, is relieved of clowning duties.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
Ethan, too, is different. He’s solemn, borderline morose. The spectre of his death looms ominously over The Final Reckoning. Even before the opening-credits roll, he swallows a cyanide pill and falls to the ground, frothing at the mouth before snapping back to life. We’ve never seen Ethan like this, so vulnerable, so exposed. He’s prepared to die for this mission. The peril used to be located in Cruise the actor – motorbiking off cliffs, halo-jumping out of aircraft carriers – rather than Ethan the character. Here, that’s reversed. Cruise replaces the expected cheeky glint in his eye with brimming tears. There’s a desperation and forcefulness to his performance. ‘I need you to trust me. One last time,’ he practically begs Angela Bassett’s President, a pleading rasp roughening his voice. It’s heart-wrenching. Particularly because of the repeated, rapid-fire flashbacks to Mission films past, which not-so-subtly remind us how much we’ve invested in this character over nearly 30 years.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
Cruise is up to his usual antics when it comes to stuntwork, wetsuited body buffeted by the icy currents of the North Pacific, cheeks puckering against G-force as he shimmies along the wing of a speeding biplane. It’s a shame that The Final Reckoning’s two largest set pieces recall more memorable ones in previous films. The submarine sequence nods to the underwater theft of Rogue Nation (2015), while the climactic airborne showdown repeats storybeats from the third-act helicopter chase in Fallout (2018). The stunts – two of which Cruise executes in nothing but boxer shorts, showing off his impressive sexagenarian musculature – demonstrate that the actor hasn’t accepted his age physically.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
Intriguingly, the script’s conservative sensibilities give him away. It’s quite clearly written by digital transplants, as opposed to natives, and ratchets up the already rabid technoscepticism of Dead Reckoning (2023). The idea that AI, an amorphous technology, can be physically captured like an object is pretty laughable, albeit unintentionally. What is deliberate is the film’s positioning of Ethan, and therefore Cruise, as a proponent of the good old (analogue) days. There’s an amusing moment when the actor, again in those boxer briefs, wrestles an Entity-protecting younger man to the ground, dispatching him with the wonderfully quippy: ‘You’ve spent too much time on the internet!’ It’s the collision of the silly but sincere Mission of yore with the contemplative, self-reflexive Mission of now. The latter knows that its heyday has passed – yet won’t surrender without a fight.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
The Final Reckoning, then, is a bittersweet experience, a dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s that caps off almost three decades of masterful action storytelling. We must be thankful that producer-actor Tom Cruise has been empowered to wrap up the franchise on his own terms (and wasn’t booted out after 2011’s Ghost Protocol, which was, incredibly, the plan at the time). It’s undoubtedly a loss that one of cinema’s greatest runners is, for now, hanging up his trainers. But it’s also a gain.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
Mission’s denouement ends Cruise’s self-imposed exile from the prestige dramas that made him a movie star (indeed, his next project is a collaboration with four-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu). Now that he’s consolidating his own legacy – instead of his franchise’s – we can but hope he subverts his heroic image and goes back to playing losers who can’t hold down jobs (Jerry Maguire, 1996), can’t sexually satisfy their wives (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999), can’t overcome their daddy issues (Magnolia, 1999). It’s the Paul Newman playbook. And who wouldn’t want a career like his?
WATCH MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING IN CINEMAS
