Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning, Review: Tom Cruises through air, water, ice and land; dies twice, lives thrice

1,000? You are nowhere near. 10,000? You are getting warmer. 100,000? That, I guess, is very, very, close. It must have taken at least 100,000 persons to put together this humungous spectacle called Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning, going by the end credits roll. I am making a wild guess, since it was not possible to count the names, which went on rolling for several minutes, and, in any case, many contributors remain uncredited. Budget estimates of what it cost to make the film are between $300 and $400 million. Let us put that in zeroes: $30,00,00,000-$40,00,00,000. Rupees anyone? At the 17 May 2025 exchange rate of Rs. 85 to a dollar, from a reliable website, the film cost Rs. 2,568 crore to Rs. 3,423 crore. Entire industries can be set-up in India with that kind of money. Governments announce packages of such sizes for the development of certain sectors of their country. Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning, is not a film, it is an industry. Averages can be odious, but the budget translates to an average income of Rs. 25,680 to Rs. 34,233 per person, including bottom of the line hands, associated with the film, though I am sure that Skydance, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie will have a take home package not much less than $300 to $400 million each, by the time the film has had its run. And its runtime is 170 minutes.

Tom Cruise announced that the seventh and eighth Mission: Impossible films would be shot back-to-back, with McQuarrie writing and directing both films. Filming of the eighth instalment began in March 2022, in the UK, Malta, South Africa and Norway. Production was halted in July 2023, due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, resumed in March 2024, and concluded in November 2024. The film, originally titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, dropped its subtitle in October 2023, and the new subtitle was announced in November 2024. The Final Reckoning had its world premiere two weeks ago, in Tokyo. Assuming it was shot and processed over a period of two years/730 days, the producers spent $55,000/day, taking the cost as $400 million. And one minute of edited film cost $2.35 million. The film’s makers are not launching welfare schemes or setting-up industries, they want to make money. And real big money. In multiples of $300-$400 million. Now, with such mind-boggling numbers, the film had better be good. Not every big investment brings such returns. No worries. They got most of it right. This one is a safe bet, and very likely to take M/s Skydance, Cruise and McQuarrie several notches up on the billionaires’ ladder.

I began watching with two handicaps. The PR agency which was handling the press previews of Mission Impossible: The Dead Reckoning (part I) did not invite me for the press show. And we poor journalists cannot afford to pay and write. As a result, I missed out on that one. So, the continuity was jerking. Although the censor certificate stated that the copy we were going to watch in IMAX had English sub-titles, it only had sub-titles when somebody spoke a language other than English. Add to that, the film has hundreds of four-frame fleeting shots, where you would require a freeze-frame and repeated rewinds and playbacks to make sense. Obviously, they either do not want you to make sense, or presume that every member of the audience has seen the prequel and will connect to the sequel, with the barest of hints. Moreover, they either expect the audience to be M.Sc.s in IT and/or AI, and wizards with numbers. Various components of a menace that could destroy the whole world are going to come together towards the end of the film (obviously; this detail is redundant), and the saviours of the planet will have from 20 minutes to a milli second to prevent the looming extermination. And they take 170 minutes/10,200 seconds to reach there. But Ethan Hunt, and his band of geniuses, which includes a state-of-the-art female pickpocket, can be trusted to achieve the impossible. Am reminded of a company that had as its credo, “We do the impossible immediately. The miraculous takes a little longer.” Ever wondered why the series is called Mission Impossible?

Now, cut to inputs from Wikipedia. Two months after it became aware of the artificial intelligence known as the Entity (no, no, not the ghost of the 1982 film; in 1982, Tom was shooting for his first film, at age 20; he is 63 now; Mission Impossible 1 arrived in 1996), the world has plunged into chaos. Disinformation is rampant, civil disorder is becoming increasingly common, and the world's nuclear powers are drawing nearer and nearer, to conflict with each other. United States President Erika Sloane reaches out to IMF (‘International Monetary Fund’? ha-ha, got you there) agent Ethan Hunt, imploring him to surrender the key to the IT system located on the sunken Russian submarine Sevastopol (then what was Belgorod?) that would allow the user to control the Entity. Hunt refuses, as he believes that nobody will be able to control it; he instead pursues his one lead, Entity agent Gabriel, who has plans of his own. Hunt assembles a team consisting of IMF agents Luther Stickell, Benji Dunn and Grace, to break Gabriel's associate, Paris, out of custody, in a bid to locate him.

Hunt and Grace attempt to apprehend Gabriel in London, but Gabriel intercepts them first. Gabriel locks Hunt in a cell and threatens Grace to force Hunt into retrieving the core of the Sevastopol for him, revealing that Hunt is responsible for the Entity's creation: it was originally known as the ‘Rabbit's Foot’, an incomplete prototype weapon that Hunt had stolen from a laboratory in Shanghai. Hunt breaks free of his cell, and gives chase, but Gabriel escapes. The IMF team find a device Gabriel used to communicate with the Entity, and it tries to persuade Hunt to give it access to a secure bunker in South Africa, to save humanity. Hunt realises that the Entity believes itself to be a god, and intends to start the war it warned him about, but that it needs to visit the bunker, to survive the coming conflict. He concludes that Gabriel has been cut off from the Entity, and develops a plan to destroy it, for good. Hunt sends the team to locate the co-ordinates for the Sevastopol, while he returns to Stickell. He finds Stickell attempting to disarm a nuclear bomb planted by Gabriel. Stickell warns Hunt that he can defuse the bomb, in a race against time, and save the city, but the drastically reduced explosion will nevertheless destroy the tube railway tunnel where he is working, and he will die in the explosion. The Plot, on Wiki, is 1,225 words. I have edited it, including my own inputs, to 417 words, and no spoilers, with due apologies to Eddie Hamilton. Who’s that? Read on.

The Final Reckoning may or may not be the final chapter in 30-year-old series (remember a James Bond film titled Never Say Never Again?), and Cruise might be replaced with a younger actor. But it is good tribute to the team of Cruise-McQuarrie. McQuarrie is a frequent collaborator with Tom Cruise, having written and directed Jack Reacher (2012), as well as four instalments of the Mission: Impossible film series: Rogue Nation (2015), Fallout (2018), Dead Reckoning (2023), in addition to uncredited rewrites on Ghost Protocol (2011). He was also a part of the writing and/or producing team on the Cruise films Valkyrie (2008), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016), The Mummy (2017), and Top Gun: Maverick (2022). McQuarrie has collaborated on this script with Erik Jendresen, of the Band of Brothers fame, who also shared the writing credit with McQuarrie in The Dead Reckoning. The duo has written a plot that is vast and wide, and encompasses various cities, and locales that are recreated by set-pieces. They have incorporated earth, wind, fire, water and ice, and all kinds of transportations that move in these realms. Though the bi-plane action scenes and the underwater escapades are breath-taking, it does seem odd that on land, Hunt rarely uses a vehicle, depending, instead, on his marathon running capabilities. Just when you see the protagonists reaching what might have been the powder-keg, the burning fuse, the writers shift co-ordinates to another location, several thousand kilometres away. When you find Hunt chasing a bi-plane as it takes off, you expect him to get a grip and move on to air-borne histrionics. Put then again, the writers let the plane beat Hunt, and then bring in another bi-plane, which he manages to latch on two. The rest is to be seen to be believed.

As director, McQuarrie gives all his actors ample scope to make their presences felt. There are multiple close-ups of almost every actor, and each has a separate, distinctive identity, some on the basis of ethnicity and language, while others on the basis of facial features and stances. In most cases, however, the actor has to look grim and rattle off some lines about IT/AI/Nuclear Physics/Decompression/Defusing of bombs/Hypothermia and such. And, as is the case with any series, there is no back-story, except when it comes as a flash, to connect a current event, or meeting, to the past. The near death situations, the dying, and the revivals, get to be monotonous by the time you have reached 120 minutes, but some of them sparked laughter in the audience. Humour also surfaces in the shape of languages, when two or more persons can speak only their own language, and not the others’. In desperation, the players resort to sign language, and though the plot points in the story are far from funny, the exchanges elicit laughter.

Do we need to have Tom Cruise in his briefs in about a quarter of the film? At least two major action scenes and many underwater exploits find him in his underwear. On the other hand, his laugh lines, seen in the airborne calisthenics, add gravitas to the character. Those scenes are breath-taking, if anything. He is good at his job, very good too, but why, as always, mumble the dialogue?  Hayley Atwell is Grace, the pick-pocket, who epitomises the definition of a great pick-pocket, as distinguished from a merely good one. It’s all about timing. She is wide-eyed most of the time. Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell, the computer technician, Ethan's best friend, and the only member of his team who dies in this film, is endearing, a far cry from the stock villain in one of the Pulp Fiction stories of yesteryear. Simon Pegg, as Benji Dunn, remains his animated, disarming self. Angela Bassett as Erika Sloane, the former CIA director, now President of the United States (a black woman President?), falls in from Fallout, and lands safely. Esai Morales as Gabriel, an assassin with ties to Ethan's past, before the IMF, who acts as the Entity's liaison, comes across as more egotistic and confused than a pure villain. Pom Klementieff as Paris, the French assassin who was betrayed by Gabriel and became Ethan's ally to kill Gabriel, has sharp features and a sexy aura. Pasha D. Lychnikoff as Captain Koltsov, the Russian, is comfortable, both while terrorising his quarry, and when he gives them a fair chance. Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, and Rolf Saxon provide high grade support. Saxon, somehow, comes across to me as an Indian actor, which he certainly is not.

Music is a key element in the narrative. The various titular themes written by Lalo Schifrin, and the back-ground score by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, leave very little to be desired. Assisted by at least thousands of post-production technicians, cinematography by Fraser Taggart is still world class. Here comes Eddie Hamilton (read above), who is the editor (what else could he be?). Quite obviously, he has had to be ruthlessly sharp with the amount of footage downloaded on his computer, to make it, a slightly stretched, 170 minutes, and that still is a sword that cuts both ways; it gives the film pace and velocity, and causes blurs when the shots are as short as a (milli?) second and leaves the audience to its imagination whenever a scene starts in mid-action.

The MI series cannot escape comparison with the Bondwagon, which took off in 1962, when Tom Cruise was born, and has lasted 63 years, like the age of the superstar. But that can be the subject of another discourse. Yet, one cannot help noticing that there was a Bond film called You Only Live Twice, and Tom Cruise lives thrice in The Final Reckoning. Well, cats have nine lives, don’t they? Ethan Hunt possesses three lives at least: one for the land, one for the water and one for the air.

Rating: *** ½

Trailer: https://youtu.be/fsQgc9pCyDU