My Corner

May 2025

Watching Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning feels like enduring a grueling climb up a jagged mountain only to be rewarded with two of the most breathtaking vistas in the entire franchise, for the film begins with a ponderous, awkwardly structured hour that drags with clunky exposition and forced nostalgia, relying on endless recaps to remind viewers that Ethan Hunt remains cinema’s last great mortal superhero before finally soaring into pulse-pounding setpieces that demonstrate why Tom Cruise remains unmatched as an action star. One could sense Christopher McQuarrie and his writing partner wanted to transform Hunt into a mythic figure, devoting the entire first act to treating him with a kind of reverence more suited to deities or Avengers, yet rather than forging a clean path into a thrilling climax, this reverence instead clutters the pacing, suffocating the audience with scenes that feel more like stitched-together deleted footage than a cohesive story.

Once that interminable prologue ends, however, the film explodes with sequences of such thrilling invention that one cannot help but surrender to their power, including a submarine dive that crackles with tension and ingenuity, reminiscent of the best submarine thrillers but executed with an intensity only this franchise can offer, and a biplane fight so precariously filmed that one’s chest tightens with every gust of wind buffeting Cruise’s face as he clings desperately to metal wings high above the earth. McQuarrie directs these scenes with supreme clarity, finding both awe-inspiring grandeur and small, human vulnerability in the chaos, as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt remains defined not by invincibility but by a stubborn willingness to endure whatever pain or humiliation necessary to complete his mission, even if that means spending an entire fight sequence in his underwear, recalling Jean-Claude Van Damme’s glorious days of hypermasculine splits and oiled torsos, though Cruise’s performance retains a winking humility absent from his eighties predecessors.

Unfortunately, despite its exhilarating peaks, the movie cannot escape its lumbering valleys, as the plot remains thin and recycled, pitting Hunt against an artificial intelligence villain whose goals and threats feel depressingly unoriginal, robbing the franchise of the grounded tension that defined its best entries. Hayley Atwell performs with confidence and polish yet remains trapped in a role so underwritten she seems present only to bat eyelashes at Cruise, a frustrating development for a series once praised for giving its female characters stakes equal to its male heroes. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames return with welcome chemistry, injecting levity into moments that might otherwise collapse under the narrative’s self-serious weight, while Pom Klementieff nearly steals the film with her fierce physicality and impish charisma, her every gesture crackling with purpose.

Ultimately, The Final Reckoning is neither a failure nor an unqualified triumph but a fractured spectacle where stunning setpieces fight valiantly to overcome a suffocatingly clunky structure, and though the film’s bloated budget and desperate bid for mythic status keep it from achieving the clean brilliance of Ghost Protocol or Fallout, its highest moments remain unmatched by any current American action franchise, proving once again that, though Ethan Hunt may never become a god, Tom Cruise remains Hollywood’s last willing martyr for practical stunts and breathtaking movie magic.