{"id":47984,"date":"2025-06-02T17:35:58","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T21:35:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=47984"},"modified":"2025-06-02T17:36:07","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T21:36:07","slug":"mission-impossible-final-reckoning-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/02\/mission-impossible-final-reckoning-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning [2025]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Ethan Hunt and his team try to take down a rogue AI and its acolytes in the direct follow-up to Dead Reckoning and disappointing franchise closer Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For nearly thirty years, Tom Cruise has been chasing danger with death-defying stunts and twisty espionage in Mission: Impossible, eight films based upon the seven-season television show. Brian DePalma\u2019s complicated feature broke down the doors in 1996, followed by John Woo\u2019s mess with M:I 2. But JJ Abrams\u2019 franchise reboot M:I III that set the tone and largess, building to the action-perfection of Fallout (I\u2019m not sure I blinked during its climax). Its follow-up, Dead Reckoning, was often lost in a sigh-inducing McGuffin leading to messy plotting, but was saved by several amazing sequences, such as the tense airport \u201cchase\u201d or the train sequence. Unfortunately, the back half (as that was part one) worsens the McGuffin and plotting, but loses the action draw, leading to such a disappointment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The issues with The Final Reckoning stem from one main cause: it\u2019s sloppy. In writing, editing, acting, and plotting, it\u2019s a loose, frustrating mess. Director (of the last three as well) Christopher McQuarrie, writing with Erik Jendresen, seems to know it\u2019s a confusing ball of plot from the get-go, spending about 90 minutes with some of the most direct expositional dialogue and cutting I\u2019ve seen. For some reason, they have assumed the audience has either not seen or completely forgotten everything about the previous seven films, or even just a few minutes ago, as it presents a greatest hits of big moments in the series, along with telling us directly who is who and why over and over again. Sorry, we don\u2019t need to flash to Luther every time his name is said; we know who he is. We also don\u2019t need to cut to something from ninety seconds ago. We remember!<\/span><\/p>\n

For a movie that tells you its plot repeatedly is also needly complicated.\u00a0 The story has the highest stakes but the lowest care about it. One of the weaknesses of Dead Reckoning was the villains in the rogue AI, The Entity, and its human avatars; head-scratching goals, and functioning wholly as a McGuffin. They want to destroy the world for\u2026 um.. Reasons? While not new to the franchise, it\u2019s always dealt with people fighting over a gizmo, such as Part III and its rabbit foot, but that had a weight thanks to Philip Seymour Hoffman\u2019s great villain performance. In a fun return, the Rabbit\u2019s Foot connects to this film. There are a few throwbacks to earlier films, some of which work (the coder from the iconic drop-in in 1996 is a welcome return, a \u201cSon of Previous Character\u201d reveal is not). Final Reckonging doubles, nay triples, down on it, in adding two more gizmos for the far too many sets of characters to chase after, fight over, and try to use (in a strange turn of events, at one point two people are fighting for control of the same object to try to do\u2026 the same thing). Little adds up in the wants and actions, established smart characters act in incredibly dumb ways, solely to not end the plot right now in ways that are insulting to the thinking audience.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Perhaps the rough start turned me off to the back half when the film gains steam, remembers it’s an action film, and gets the pieces where they are ready to be moved around. When I revisit, I\u2019ll be tempted to skip the first hour and a half and see if I can properly enjoy the two larger action sequences. A trip into a sunken submarine should have excited me. It\u2019s a gimbal set-up, as Hunt flies around a shifting series of rooms. Gimbals always make me happy. The planning and design that goes into something that looks great is exciting. But it\u2019s cut so oddly, the tension seeps from the scene.\u00a0 The advertised bi-plane sequence is often thrilling, but also suffers from strange choices, feeling like a lesser version of the series high helicopter chase in Fallout.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That said, I appreciate the sheer amount of work, talent, planning, skill, and straight-up \u201cgoing for it\u201d of these sequences. On a technical level, they are huge and complicated. It\u2019s astounding what Cruise and the stunt teams across the films have put together, often upping the ante and doing everything they can to astonish and wow the audience more than any other franchise. This deserves every accolade to get out into the world and present as much as they can as practically as possible. It\u2019s a rarity these days to approach action in this way, avoiding overly computer-generated, green-screen, blandly planned slug fests.\u00a0 I wish the film around this love of huge cinema was better, especially after so many great entries. Tom Cruise is insane at crowd-pleasing, and I love him for it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I feel bad for the talented actors gathered together to run through. Whether it be series regulars Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, or newer team members Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and of course, Tom Cruise, all seem lost and pushing through. They\u2019re mostly regulated to high melodrama of shouting lines and exposition, telling us exactly what\u2019s going on, and moving through from scene to scene with no real weight. I do want a hit of whatever Esai Morales was on as cartoonish villain Gabriel; at least he is having a good time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not mad at Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning, I\u2019m disappointed by it. With a needlessly complicated plot, atrocious exposition, and all the tension edited out of the should-be-great action sequences, the last in a great series is a letdown. But everyone else seems to like it, listen to them, see for yourself how wrong I might be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ethan Hunt and his team try to take down a rogue AI and its acolytes in the direct follow-up to Dead Reckoning and disappointing franchise closer Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[58,3699],"class_list":["post-47984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-action","tag-franchise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47984"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47989,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47984\/revisions\/47989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}