Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning - Sum of 8 choices

Exactly 29 years ago, on May 22, 1996, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) made his iconic, soft as a whisper, upside down entry from a ceiling exhaust shaft into a blinding white secure vault room at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, with the release of the original Mission: Impossible movie. Now with Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the eighth movie in the franchise, the saga, from all indications, seems to have drawn to a resounding close. This was originally supposed to have released last July, but got pushed out by almost a year due to the Hollywood actors strike where ironically AI and its use by the studios was one of the major bones of contention.

For fans of the series it has Easter eggs and callbacks galore to all the previous 7 movies. (The only one I have revealed is the release date of the original movie which plays a role in this one). Over the course of just about 3 decades, the series has reinvented itself by keeping current with the latest in technology while maintaining its basic structure and world saving ethos. (In the original, the tech hacker Luther (Ving Rhames) asked for a computer with a Pentium 686 chip with a RISC processor, to this latest one dealing with a global AI called The Entity.) The evolution is a meta one as well with the second movie named Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) with an Arabic number, the third one Mission: Impossible III (2006) with a Roman number, and then the next 5 with add-on titles like Ghost Protocol (2011), Rogue Nation (2015), Fallout (2018) and Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) (my review of that is here), culminating with The Final Reckoning (I guess they abandoned the Part 2 nomenclature and went with Final, probably to give a sense of finality to the franchise).

The story takes off from where the previous one ended with the continuing search for the source code of the Entity in order to prevent it from unleashing global Armageddon. The nuclear weapons of India and Pakistan make a fleeting guest appearance as well, (luckily though no Arnab screaming at the camera) along with those of the other declared powers of US, UK, France, Russia, China, Israel and North Korea. All the main characters from it are there performing their roles admirably - the arch nemesis Gabriel (Esai Morales), the charming pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), the sleazy ambitious boss Kittridge (Henry Czerny), the snarky but compassionate Benji (Simon Pegg), the enigmatic Frenchwoman assassin unimaginatively named Paris (Pom Klementieff), the perpetual Ethan Hunt chaser Briggs (Shea Whigham) who has an interesting connection to the original movie in the franchise, along with another character played by Rolf Saxon (I won't reveal his character's name since that could be a spoiler, but suffice it to say he too has a connection to the original - "Barnes, I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day, just mail him his clothes". If you crack that, go to the head of the class). Special mention also to two new scene stealers - Tramell Tillman as submarine Captain Bledsoe and Lucy Tulugarjuk as Tapeesa, an Inuit.

Most of the movies in the franchise are thick with technological gobbledygook and complex convoluted ways of saving the world, and weighty dialogue like "We live and die in shadows for those who we know and for those we never meet", but this one takes it up several notches. The number of hoops the team has to jump thru multiply faster than rabbits or Elon Musk breeding, and just like his weirdly named offspring, the sheer volume and weird complexity sometimes works to its detriment and thus considerably adding to its 2hr 50 min run time. The thrilling climax though makes up for it with 3 levels of intercutting suspense, aided by deft editing by editor Eddie Hamilton and director Christopher McQuarrie, with the piece de resistance being Cruise doing his insane real life stunts hanging off a biplane thousands of feet in the air. After all sorts of hi-tech gadgetry and stunts on motorbikes, cars, planes and helicopters, I guess there was nothing left other than a good old analog world biplane. Heck for those of us of a certain IT world vintage, even floppy disks make an appearance.

At the age of 62, when most Americans are starting to collect their Social Security retirement checks, this guy is an ageless wonder. But unfortunately time and tide wait for no man (heck even the character Ethan Hunt is past his 60th birthday having been born on August 18, 1964) and one can see the difference between his youthful self in his 30s in the flashbacks and now. Maybe that's why both Ethan and Tom have decided to hang up their boots as far as this series is concerned. For even the most intrepid world saver, some things do finally become mission impossible.

May 26, 2025