Warning: This review, should you choose to read this, contains spoilers.
For your average cinephile, the summer films of 2025 do not disappoint.
“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” premiered in theaters on May 23. The film completes the story of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023) and serves as the final installment of eight action blockbusters (1996-2025) centering on the man, the myth and the legend himself: Impossible Mission Force (IMF) agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise).
The mission, as Ethan accepts it, stars two longtime franchise players: Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg). Luther has been in every “Mission: Impossible” installment since the franchise’s conception and is an IMF operative with a technology specialty. In other words, he shoots, he drives and he’s got a knack for diffusing bombs and building what the team needs. Benji is an IMF tech support who becomes Ethan’s closest confidante and friend. He first appeared in the franchise’s third film and has been a fan-favorite supporting role in the franchise. Other star players are the returning cast of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One:” skilled pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), an assassin who worked for Gabriel until Ethan saved her life, the President (Angela Bassett) and Gabriel (Esai Morales), a terrorist liaison for the overall film villain, an artificial intelligence called the Entity.
Like every other “Mission: Impossible” movie, the film captures action and emotion in a high-stakes, compelling and heart-pounding, near-three-hour runtime. Tom Cruise once again demonstrates his love for movies with his death-defying stunts. Ethan has classic sparks with the female lead, several classic Tom Cruise runs down London and the team rolling in action with the franchise’s iconic theme. What makes this film stand out from the other films, aside from being a sequel, is that it concludes the saga of Ethan Hunt. Nostalgia is imbued with the action, the heart and the urgency of living in a world where Ethan Hunt is its best protector.
Early on, it is revealed that when Ethan agreed to steal the Rabbit’s Foot in exchange for his wife way back in the third movie, it was actually the first seeds of the Entity; this is a clever way to tie everything together for our protagonist. In his first and only confrontation with the Entity, it threatens a mass nuclear war (another interesting recurring theme in the franchise) should Ethan refuse to accept his destiny.
This time, the conversation about Ethan Hunt being the living manifestation of destiny is much larger thematically.
Gabriel believes it’s Ethan’s destiny to help him control the Entity. Maniacal, I know. The Entity, our modern-day Ultron, perceives Ethan as a viable threat to its goal of human extinction and wants to take control of him, so it speaks of his destiny to serve a higher calling. Grace agrees, saying that his moral compass is so solid that he could control the Entity. Ethan refuses, stating that it’s too much power for anyone to have. For this reason, he refuses to help the American government get hold of it. This righteousness is what makes Ethan Hunt a lovable character; he does the impossible because he knows that no one else will.
The film picks up where we left off with the team. Ethan has to figure out how to stop Gabriel and the Entity, but there’s much he and the team don’t know. As usual, he’s being hunted by the CIA and IMF as he hasn’t surrendered the cruciform keys — crucial to accessing the Entity — to the United States government so they can gain its power. He and Benji roll into action right away; they recruit Luther, who creates the poison pill — the ultimate tool to destroy the Entity, break Paris out of CIA custody and end up recruiting Degas to their cause. Lastly, Ethan meets up with Grace, who had been holding onto the cruciform keys.
Their reunion is short-lived, as soon after, Gabriel kidnaps them. When they awaken, they’re tied up. The scene seemed to parallel one of Cruise’s most iconic stunts, “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” (2015), where he climbs a pole with his hands tied behind him. Instead of having a fight sequence with fierce contender Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), he reveals that he has a cyanide pill in his mouth and tells Gabriel to let them go or else he’ll swallow it. In true IMF style, he swallows it when Gabriel calls his bluff, and when his henchmen take off the restraints to keep him alive, Ethan springs into action. Ethan brutally hits and stabs the men while blood splatters everywhere. The camera is centered on Grace for a solid sixty seconds as we hear bangs and shouts, then the camera slowly pans to the men stacked on top of each other with blood drenching Ethan’s shirt.
What also made the scene funny is that when he and Grace, a rookie to Ethan’s world of spies and kidnapping, are kidnapped. But, he eyes the torture tools left out and reassures her that nothing’s going to happen. He even says casually, “It’s all just pain.” He assures her that they have time to escape, but then catches sight of guards coming their way and goes: “Nope. This is happening.”
It was a classic “Mission: Impossible” sequence that will forever be timeless. I loved that little nod of consistency to what makes this franchise so iconic.
Which, speaking of timeless, the stunts were insane. My anxiety skyrocketed so many times throughout this film. I seriously wonder how people with heart conditions watch any of Cruise’s filmography.
The first death-defying act Ethan performs is in the Arctic. Ethan jumps from an aircraft into the Bering Sea with only a wetsuit. Then, in a prototype suit, dives deep into the Arctic Ocean into an old-timey, nuke-filled submarine on the edge of a trench. His prerogative is to acquire a device in the submarine that has the anticode to the Entity.
To be honest, I don’t know how Ethan survived this aside from plot armor, given that all this was happening midway into the movie.
First and foremost, Ethan goes through trials and tribulations to get to the submarine. He has to convince the President to trust him, not fire America’s nukes at the world, convince a very long list of people to trust him despite his record of not following orders and actually get to the submarine — that’s not even counting him being able to get the decades-old device of anticode out of the submarine.
This entails Ethan having to jump straight into the Bering Strait to reach an intermediate submarine, avoid being killed by a rogue pro-Entity operative on said submarine and survive the swim from the submarine through the heavy-pressure ocean floor. As if this all wasn’t complicated enough, there is a Russian submarine directly on their tail.
No joke, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. I didn’t anticipate that when Ethan would open the submarine door to get launched out that the Russian submarine would be staring at him/the audience in the face.
On top of all of that, Ethan is relying on his team to find the scientist on an island in the Bering Strait to send him the coordinates via Morse code and hope that the submarine’s radar, which goes up for exactly fifteen minutes for every two hours, picks it up. Oh, and each time the radar turns on, it lets the Russian submarines know their location. He’s also trusting his team to set up the extraction point for him and is unaware that, on the island, they get ambushed.
Yeah, a lot was going on. That’s “Mission: Impossible” for you.
I love a good action sequence. I love the thrills of the stakes. Tom Cruise manages to outdo himself every time. Ethan just nearly manages to evade getting nicked to death by the tailing Russian sub’s turbine and then struggles his way through the nuke-sub, because it just so happens to be on an unstable cliff that leads to an underwater trench.
Oh, and did I mention that Ethan only had twenty minutes before he’d lose oxygen?
And everything that could go wrong, did. Nukes fell on him, covering his exit, the team was held hostage, resulting in a very late signal being sent, the submarine began falling into the trench with Ethan still inside, Ethan couldn’t fit into the escape pod with his suit, so he had to strip down to fit and once he got out, the team was late in picking him up (well-justified as they were attacked and held hostage).
This sequence was crazy. Insane. Anxiety-inducing. I have no idea how they pulled it off. That was a good twenty to thirty minutes of holding my breath and mumbling in the theatre, “There’s no way he’s not going to die. They’re all going to die.” As anxiety-inducing as it was, I loved it. That’s what “Mission: Impossible” is all about: defying the impossible odds and expectations.
True to the franchise, the film’s third act, also known as how do we stop the end of the world as we know it but this time avoid global catastrophe, outdoes the previous film’s train and bike jump scene. The team planned to give Gabriel the device that Ethan extracted from the submarine, because when he’d put it into the poison pill he stole from Luther, he’d think he’d won, but in reality, he’d be trapping the Entity. But of course, the mission goes south.
Just as Ethan’s about to give Gabriel the device, one of the IMF agents, the son of a former villain in a previous movie, sabotages the operation, prompting Gabriel to activate his megabomb that’s set to detonate in 20 minutes, the same time left before the Entity acquires America’s nukes and sends all the nukes off to acquire global destruction and human extinction.
Gabriel manages to escape, and Ethan takes off after him. I love that the film didn’t shy away from giving us Tom Cruise’s iconic runs.
The airplane sequence was exhilarating. Ethan clings to a biplane as it takes off into the air, climbs up it and flies it all while trying to catch up with Gabriel, who keeps hitting and damaging his plane. Right before the plane crashes from damage, Ethan leaps onto Gabriel’s plane. Gabriel performs maneuver after maneuver as Ethan struggles to cling to the plane. Midair, he slipperily navigates gripping onto the plane’s wing and several rods and poles. It was intense, to say the least.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. The fact that Cruise actually does the stunts sells the scene because when you watch these films, it’s not “Oh yeah, the computer-generated imagery looks cool,” it’s “How the hell did he not die from that?” My mouth was hanging open, I was sitting up straighter and I couldn’t think of anything else but Ethan hovering in the air and struggling to stay on the aircraft. There were several instances where he got hit or lost his grip for a moment, and I couldn’t breathe. I’m not sure I was breathing for most of this movie, if I’m being honest. Kudos to Cruise for his dedication to making the mission as impossible as possible.
As if it weren’t already tense to watch Ethan evade death from being stabbed through a plane midair that was doing loops, flips and a semi-barrel roll, the team was figuring out how to disarm the nuke. They were also setting up the trap for the Entity and trying to keep fan-favorite, cinnamon-roll Benji awake for him to advise Grace on how to set everything up. On the other side, the President was facing pressure to go against her word of trusting Ethan and set off the first nuke before the Entity can. Oh, and there’s no margin for error: if the bomb goes off, whoever’s in the room dies. If Benji isn’t awake to guide Grace, then they won’t be able to trap the Entity. The plan relies on precision: all of the Entity has to get into the drive trap so that it is severed from the Internet, but, if they wait even a moment too long, it can escape once it realizes that it’s trapped in “false data.”
The stunt sequence was insane. I mean, I have no words to describe the fear — the excitement — only that there was so much of it and it was so tangible. I felt everything. It’s what makes cinema so enjoyable: you’re able to go to a movie, have the lights dim and be immersed in this world with maybe too much plot armor, but who cares? I love it.
The transitions between these very different worlds were done cleanly. I watched Ethan dangle out of an airplane, clinging to a mere seatbelt, Benji bleed out profusely while guiding Paris to cut him to prevent him from going into cardiac arrest all while the American government considered nuking an American city to show diplomacy rather than nuking the other armed countries.
The action engages the viewer. I go from worrying about Ethan being able to save the day and stay alive, to being afraid for the side characters to being scared that the American government will screw it up as it tends to in films and make matters even worse. And at the same time, I’m appreciating the laws of physics as Ethan jumps around on a flying plane.
This movie is what pure anxiety feels like.
At the very last second, the President decides to launch the nukes. We cut to Benji sputtering through telling Grace to be ready to cut in the blink of an eye (120 milliseconds) and then to Ethan and Gabriel hanging off the plane, Ethan having the poison pill and device, but no parachute on an out-of-control plane.
Gabriel pulls his parachute, only to get his head lodged in the plane and die. I can’t lie, that scene was bloody and caught me off guard. But, there’s no relief. Not yet. Haven’t you heard? This is a “Mission: Impossible” review.
As Ethan struggled to get on the plane and pair the two devices with time running out to less than five minutes (classic “Mission: Impossible”), I sat there on the edge of my seat waiting for the big reveal: Ethan putting the devices together, him figuring out a way to soften his blow, Benji to go into cardiac arrest or not when he passed out and Paris had a grim face when she felt his pulse, one of the nukes that the Entity set ready to attack being released by a government, a surprise appearance or some other crazy thing.
He is unable to do it on the plane, so he grabs a parachute, which quickly goes up in flames, and he spirals out of control in the air.
The whole theatre, including me, gasped at this scene. The movie’s title seemed to hint at the impossible: Ethan Hunt dying on a mission, but also, his track record would indicate otherwise. Ethan has unlucky good luck, where everything seems to go wrong, but at the last second, the team pulls through. This time, I was fairly certain that Ethan wouldn’t make it.
The mission succeeds, though. Grace gets the green light and does the cut and snatch of the drive in a true blink of an eye. It was impressive. I didn’t think that the director would’ve had it shot exactly that quickly, and that realism made it all the more practical and relieving.
It’s revealed that Ethan and everyone else on the team live. The Entity is locked away forever and Ethan Hunt once again proves that he is the true manifestation of destiny.
I could only truly relax after the last scene, where we see Ethan meeting his new team in the crowd of London. I’m grateful that Ethan got to live to see the mission successful. Call it sappy and naive, but I appreciate when a film, especially a film franchise, maintains character consistency. Ethan Hunt is the guy who can find an impossibly reasonable way to get out of anything. Only death can take him out. Besides, Tom Cruise has wonderfully brought this character and world to life, and the idea of “Mission: Impossible” ending without the man himself seems wrong. It makes all the difference; if Ethan doesn’t survive, then all the struggles he goes through don’t feel all that powerful. Ethan Hunt is the epitome of surviving because the world needs him to — those that he sees and those that he’ll never see.
Another thing I love about “Mission: Impossible” movies is that the plot comes as the action goes because there’s always new information, involved characters, diversions, etc. The action leads and defines the plot; it is the vessel through which complications and information come to Ethan, and therefore the audience. It’s a great tactical decision that keeps the thrill from being overused and feeds into the necessary rush of being on a time crunch while saving the world.
It honors the character’s legacy, and who doesn’t like seeing their longtime protagonist survive?
Albeit, I have two critiques of the film. The film spent more time showing Ethan and Grace’s relationship when she is a newcomer compared to the longtime Luther and Benji. I am a firm believer that in 2025, Ethan Hunt doesn’t need a love interest. His character in the first few movies was about his wife, whom he had divorced to protect her from her enemies. His next leading lady became Ilsa Faust, whom it is clear that Ethan cares about, as he does with all of his team. They’re a great duo who connect through being betrayed by their countries and struggling to abide by government contracts when the right thing to do is to call for them. I don’t see the chemistry between him and Grace. They’re worlds apart physically and mentally. I kept waiting for the trailer scene of him hugging Benji with them both in tears, only to not get a single scene that was just the two of them. In both times when he’s saying bye to Benji (which could have been the last time they ever saw each other), he spends more time comforting Grace.
Had this not been the last movie in the franchise, I don’t think I would have minded as much, but given that “Mission: Impossible” is the culmination of these stories and Benji is crucial to Ethan’s story, I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t get any real scenes when they’ve spent quality time together in previous films. Still, I appreciated the little gesture they shared where Ethan tells Benji, the longtime standing teammate and friend, that he’s the team leader.
The other note I had was that there was so much emphasis on nostalgia that worked well, with flashbacks, past character returns and franchise nods (such as the knife from the second film) that there was one classic trick missing. I was waiting for a facemask scene. In every movie, there’s a grand plot twist where Ethan and the team pretend to be someone else and whips off the face mask. There was a brief scene in the beginning, but I would’ve liked to see more of the shenanigans that made the franchise what it is today. These tropes never risk fatigue because of how well they get pulled off, and they work to propel the story forward.
On a side note, as someone who’s watched this franchise grow from spies and espionage to larger, global threats, the franchise does more than what it’s advertised.
At face value, “Mission: Impossible” appears to be about Tom Cruise’s signature death-defying stunts, runs, cool action sequences and Ethan flirting with his female co-stars. However, this franchise never fails to provide commentary on embracing destiny, loyalty and the dangers of government power.
Never before had the stakes been higher for Ethan. He struggled to keep his friends and the world safe; he lost Luther and he nearly lost Benji. He had to fight the lies and deception posed by the Entity from all angles: from his mind being messed with, the people sent to kill him and even those supporting powerful people in government, such as the President. His character’s trademark is to be loyal to justice and humanity, not a government, and it is this loyalty that makes him a dangerous, impossible-not-to-root-for operative.
The plot of an AI being the toughest antagonist Ethan Hunt faced speaks to the fact that AI is on the rise globally. It’s in our school systems, movies and government — something that Cruise has been vocally against, which may have inspired the film as the two-part storyline was drafted and produced during the pandemic. It’s even being used to screen med school applicants. In more ways than we know, AI is reshaping the world and making it fit its algorithm. It’s dangerous, and in a world without superheroes and action stars like Ethan Hunt, the rise of AI could be our final reckoning. AI makes a unique villain in this franchise, but carries the same intensity as previous human, arguably more evil, antagonists Ethan had to face.
“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” lives up to the franchise’s legacy and is an enjoyable ride and true ode to action films. I’m truly sad to see Ethan Hunt go (or will he be back? I mean, he didn’t die, so … ?) and I’m off to find a streaming service that has all the past movies.
Final Score: 9/10
