Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt once again thrills with spectacular, not-to-be-missed stunts

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)

In theaters

I haven’t followed this franchise across its 29 years and eight movies, so I had to play catchup as I watched. Those moviegoers versed in Tom Cruise’s headlong gyrations as Ethan Hunt in seven previous MI movies may drop into this latest one like a parachute jumper onto a bale of hay.

I flailed but easily gave in to the movie’s abrupt but ever more intriguing plot twists. I was jolted, sometimes bewildered and occasionally clueless, but happily so. The three-hour run time left me ready for more (though word is that this may be the last of the series).

I came out understanding why one could gobble up this heady heroism. Defying death doesn’t begin to describe the scale of what Ethan and his team come up against this time. And at 62, Cruise still runs, bare-knuckle brawls and schemes his way out of impossibly tight spots like a lithe 30-year-old.

In this outing he works every muscle. A nasty, eerily blossoming cyber-virus called the Entity, featured in the previous outing, Dead Reckoning (2023), has now metastasized into a massive artificial intelligence and gone totally, rabidly anti-human.

The Entity says let’s get rid of humanity and start over. There’s a nice little planet here I could do something with.

And humans, the diabolical cyber-being notes with a malicious electronic chuckle, have charmingly done all the necessary prep work for their own destruction. The Entity has finagled its way into the nuclear arsenals of India, Israel, Pakistan and France and stands ready to trigger all their atomic weapons pointed across the globe.

All that remains to complete its devastating wipeout is to wrest control of the nuclear weapons of the U.S., China, Russia and the UK. What a barbecue!

A desperate U.S. President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) pleads with Ethan to locate the Entity’s source code and render it unable to launch any nuclear weapons anywhere on Earth.

Expert U.S. nuclear analysts have warned the president that within three days suspicions among nations will have become intolerable, and one country or another will start Armageddon.

With that ticking clock, Ethan and his Impossible Missions Force colleagues set off to find a device whose program can disable the Entity’s source code.

Ethan, Benji and Grace in South Africa seeking the device that can checkmate the Entity

His former teammates don’t hesitate to join him, and though they were all new to me, I had no trouble seeing them as a fine-tuned action ensemble – as well as a proficient killing machine when backed against the wall.

First among equals is Ving Rhames’ Luther, a technical wizard with a warm heart. He’s as ready for action as any of the posse, but Rhames endows this seasoned crime fighter with a touching, autumnal gravity.

Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) is a nuclear expert and also medically knowledgeable. Paris (Pom Klementieff) is an assassin with scores to settle I could only imagine. Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) is a weapons expert who wields knives, handguns and rifles with split second dexterity.

Grace (Hayley Atwell) remains all-around fearless and quickly accepts any assignment – including guiding a dogsled team across Arctic ice – Ethan asks her to take on. They cast moist-eyed glances at one another that made me wonder whether their connection was, however coyly shown, romantic.

But Ethan is the quintessential lone wolf; so, while he guides the team, he reserves the most dangerous challenges for himself. And what peril this guy faces.

Ethan prowling the chambers of a sunken sub in a desperate search to save mankind

We see Ethan dive to the Arctic Ocean floor and board a wrecked Russian submarine. He’s looking for a device armed with a code that can render the Entity powerless. He nabs the gizmo, but only after he’s dodged tumbling torpedoes and stripped to skivvies in icy water, gulping what could be his last breath.

But no, he survives only to learn that he and the team will have to venture to the mountains of South Africa.

There Ethan will fight it out, clinging to two bobbing and weaving single-engine planes, with the evil Gabriel (Esai Morales), who wants control of the Entity not to stop it but to master it to pursue his own mad scheme to rule the world.

Isn’t this all a bit much? Well, no, not actually. I don’t think that everyday reality matters in the world of Ethan Hunt and his team.

The heightened action was precisely what kept me fascinated. Not that anyone could actually perform such feats. But the world-saving principle of the action is what I think will make an audience want to believe in it – at least for the movie’s runtime.

For it isn’t just AI that looms in the minds of us in the audience. Watching Angela Bassett’s principled President Sloane put the country’s, and the world’s, safety above all other interests – against the pleas of nearly all her advisors – is a model of another kind of heroism, the selfless humanistic kind we may be running out of.

I think Cruise, Director Christopher McQuarrie and his co-screenwriter Erik Jendresen, besides keeping the action hot and vivid, want to send that kind of signal. It’s not just badassery that a world in peril needs. It’s the courage, conscience and a subordination of ego that the president here summons that actually save the day.

In trusting Ethan, President Sloane is relying not just on his prowess but on his decency to complete the job. That undeniably corny grace note in the script formed part of what I took away. Not just the impeccably staged action. But a close up on people with a conscience, struggling on behalf of something bigger than themselves.

Okay, this is an action movie, not a propaganda screed. But I liked its (hopelessly naive?) one-world advocacy, too. Ethan and the gang long to land on the right – the fair and equitable – side of history. That’s going to require a fighting spirit from nearly all of us on the planet.

Yes, in this thrill-packed escapist movie that spirit is depicted with over-the-top daring, in outlandishly “unrealistic” feats.

But finally, isn’t it the spirit that counts? I say, keep kicking ass, Ethan. We need fighters as driven as you are out here in the real world, too.