The mission is finally over for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) with Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, and the fuse may have fizzled just a little at the end. While being met with the best box-office opening of the franchise and respectable critical reception, there's no denying that it doesn't hit the heights of the prior peaks in the series. It should still be seen in a theater purely for the climactic biplane scene and for Tramell Tillman's performance alone, but it suffers mightily from a deeply self-inflicted sluggish pace. In its efforts to bring this saga to a satisfying close, it significantly amped up its stock in self-seriousness, to its severe detriment. If any one element is the culprit of this fatal flaw, it's the film's insistence upon flashbacks to previous films in the series that drastically damages its sense of flow.
'Final Reckoning' Dropped the Ball on Delivering Key Story Beats
Ostensibly, The Final Reckoning is meant to be a direct sequel to Dead Reckoning that promises to wrap up its storyline involving the defeat of the evil AI program "The Entity." In practice, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie instead drops many of the implied threads left intentionally dangling, and he instead pretzel-wraps the script in itself to find a way to write himself out of corners he put himself into. He forgot to make Gabriel (Esai Morales) into a compelling villain, he forgot to fill out Hunt's mysterious backstory, and he forgot that his previous films, like Fallout, ripped so hard because they slipped freewheeling levity underneath the bombastic high stakes.
It's also hard to shake off the feeling that the film knows it only has two standout sequences, the submarine exploration and the biplane sequence, and so it frantically tries to pad out its runtime to justify a narrative that's nothing more than the second half of a bloated story with no real point to it. Nowhere is this more egregiously obvious than in its implementation of these dreadful flashbacks, which quickly become less of a stylistic flourish and more of a narrative bandaid.
'The Final Reckoning's Flashbacks Are a Huge Distraction
In trying to convince us that this really is the last M:I film, Final Reckoning works overtime to tie every single previous film together into its plot (except for Mission: Impossible II). Whether it's the dismissal of Donloe (Rolf Saxon) from Mission: Impossible, the "Rabbit's Foot" from Mission: Impossible III, or even Ethan's more notable exploits in Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation, many events from earlier entries get "resolved" or at least name-dropped in order to build up Ethan Hunt's status as the world's only true savior. To hammer this home, we're tasked with sitting through countless brief flashbacks to every single name-drop of every major event or figure in Ethan's history as an IMF agent, all footage taken directly from the original presentation of each film. By itself, there's sound intention, as a lot has happened throughout the franchise to be reminded of, and flashbacks can be an incredibly effective tool to keep the audience invested in the current moment. However, the execution of this tactic is insanely sloppy for a number of reasons.
'The Final Reckoning's Decisions Disrupt the Flow Close
First off, the film seems to believe that one flashback per mention isn't enough, and the audience apparently needs every flashback to appear multiple times to a condescending degree. You like the shot of Ethan grabbing the Rabbit's Foot? How about the iconic Dutch angle shot of Ethan descending from the ceiling while Donloe is unaware of him? Then get ready to see such shots at least four times each, all plopped into the middle of already-tension-lacking scenes like raw meat dropped on a plate. I get that people's attention spans have allegedly gotten shorter in our increasingly Internet-brained times, but I can't imagine why anybody thought inserting the same shot repeatedly would help make an already-too-long film go by quicker. The shots are barely even motivated by the emotional reality of the scene, as there's no discipline to their inclusion, since a character just has to offhandedly mention something once for it to warrant a flash.
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There's an adage that you shouldn't reference a much better film during your probably worse film, and seeing so many clips from so many other Mission: Impossible films just drives home how tired Final Reckoning can feel. Being reminded so many times of how visually exciting the other films were, be it De Palma's sweat-inducing angles, J.J. Abrams' eye-popping color scheme, or Brad Bird's gliding propulsion, aggravates how coverage-focused and choppily edited Christopher McQuarrie's last effort is. It makes it impossible not to ruminate on how exactly McQuarrie put his final film in the franchise in a position where he seems to have ripped it apart and used the flashbacks to put it back together in order to answer to the critics who found Dead Reckoning a disappointment.
In his other M:I films, McQuarrie was a master of precise plot construction and selling the magnitude of the human effort it took to get impossible missions done, and the flashbacks actively work against his strengths. They take what should have been a rousing climax for a franchise that embodies the miraculous wonders that Hollywood can still produce and turn it into a clip-show slog, like a filler episode of a TV show that's almost over but has no more narrative direction. Considering that Mission: Impossible started as a television show, that's tragically fitting.
Your Rating close 10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Rate Now 0/10 Like Follow Followed Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning PG-13 Action Adventure Crime 8 10 9.2/10 Release Date May 23, 2025 Runtime 169 Minutes Director Christopher McQuarrie Writers Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen Prequel(s) Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible 2, Mission: Impossible III, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Cast See All Tom Cruise Ethan Hunt Ving Rhames Luther Stickell Main Genre Action Powered by Expand Collapse