Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) Review: High-Stakes Pyrotechnics, Mixed Payoffs

We can deceive the Lord of Lies.”
— Ethan Hunt, contemplating an A.I. apocalypse

A farewell built on flashbacks and free-falls

After eight entries of ever-escalating spectacle, Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise pitch Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning as a grand goodbye—only to discover that closure is harder to engineer than a HALO jump. Released in U.S. theaters on May 23, 2025, the film parachutes directly out of Dead Reckoning’s cliff-hanger: Ethan Hunt must trap—or destroy—the Entity, a sentient A.I. now burrowed so deeply into the internet that wiping it might black out global networks.

That premise is catnip for franchise stakes, yet the opening hour plays like a somber recap reel. Re-scored flashbacks remind newcomers who held which cruciform key, while returning fans may feel they’re watching a highlight video interrupted by a conference briefing. The exposition overload dulls momentum, even as Angela Bassett’s President Sloane frets about firing nukes pre-emptively. Still, once the film finally sheds its narrative overcoat, the stunt-craft roars to life—and that is where The Final Reckoning earns its ticket price.

Cruise control: the body as box-office

At 63, Cruise still sprints as though the wind itself is late for a meeting. He clings to a barrel-rolling biplane above South-African canyons and later plunges into the flooded wreck of the Sevastopol submarine in a set piece that weaponizes claustrophobia. Every gasp is practical, every bead of sweat a reminder that no one else spends $400 million to do their own death-defying choreography. The vertiginous mid-air grappling match between Hunt and Esai Morales’s Gabriel rivals the Burj Khalifa climb for sheer jaw-dropping audacity.

Yet Cruise’s unflagging commitment underlines a larger tension: the franchise’s aging avatar versus its digital antagonist. The Entity represents algorithmic omnipotence; Hunt replies with flesh-and-blood determination. It’s an unmistakable meta-commentary on movie-making in an A.I. era, one made sharper by the production delays during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike.

Supporting players: underused but unforgettable

The Final Reckoning fields a dream roster: Hayley Atwell’s nimble thief-turned-agent Grace, Ving Rhames’s gravel-voiced Luther, Simon Pegg’s anxious Benji, Pom Klementieff’s anarchic Paris, and Tramell Tillman’s silk-tongued submarine captain. Sadly, the script rarely lets them breathe. Atwell, so sparky in Dead Reckoning, spends long stretches serving as a moral sounding board who urges Ethan to seize rather than smash the A.I. Paris flickers between feral glee and narrative afterthought. Only Tillman injects fresh charisma, gliding through cramped corridors as if giving a VIP tour of the abyss.

Spectacle versus story: who wins?

McQuarrie composes kinetic ballets—echoing the motorcycle-cliff dive from Fallout with vertigo-inducing aerial combat—but he cannot resist doubling back to franchise lore. Cameos from long-forgotten characters underline a theme of reckoning with past choices, yet these nostalgic detours also stretch the runtime to a bloated 2 hours 49 minutes. Tonally the film veers from whispered portent—“all life hangs in the balance”—to mask-ripping gags that verge on self-parody. The resulting experience is exhilarating in spikes yet exasperating in lulls, a movie caught between eulogizing Ethan Hunt and teeing up Mission #9.

Sound and fury: a refreshed musical pulse

Newcomers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey lace Lalo Schifrin’s iconic motif with metallic pulses and sub-bass throbs that echo the Entity’s digital heartbeat. Submarine hull groans morph into jump scares, and the Cape Town rooftop chase pounds with kinetic percussion. The sonic update underscores how the series evolves even as it quotes itself.

Does The Final Reckoning live up to its title?

Not entirely. The film flirts with finality—funeral-eulogy praise sessions, elegiac flashbacks—but hedges its bets with a London epilogue that hands Ethan a glowing thumb drive and the faint promise of another impossible mission. Whether that tease exhilarates or frustrates will depend on how worn you feel after three decades of IMF mayhem.

Verdict

4 out of 5 rogue agents. When the stunts kick in, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning showcases blockbuster filmmaking at its most muscular: audacious, practical, and occasionally jaw-dropping. Yet those peaks are undercut by an exposition-sodden story and a runtime hefty enough to test audience endurance. If this truly is Ethan Hunt’s curtain call, it is an electrifying—but undeniably messy—bow.

Where to continue the mission

Readers who crave a granular, spoiler-packed breakdown—complete with a detailed timeline, character arcs, and theme analysis—can head to the movie’s dedicated page on What’s After the Movie. There you’ll find a concise summary, interactive quizzes to test your IMF acumen, and convenient links to other providers. For broader context, the What’s After the Movie blog hosts long-form analyses, opinion pieces, and periodic franchise retrospectives that enrich the conversation.

Alternate perspectives are only a click away on sites such as Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, TMDB, Wikipedia, JustWatch, Box Office Mojo, Letterboxd, IMCDb, and Fandango, each offering aggregate scores, user reviews, trivia, and up-to-the-minute box-office data.

This review will self-destruct in five seconds—unless you share it first.