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Movie review: Tom Cruise gives his all for stunts in final 'Mission: Impossible'

Article (news)

Fred Hawson

<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/174753169110720250518020516_p0lb3yfm.jpg.webp" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib"/>Tom Cruise in &#x27;Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning&#x27; </div>It has been two months since Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) acquired the two halves of a key which was needed to gain control of the Entity. The US President Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett) had personally reached out to Hunt to surrender the key to her government. However, Hunt believed that the Entity should be destroyed outright. This powerful artificial intelligence was now wreaking havoc, taking over the nuclear arsenals of the world.The action picked up right from where &quot;Dead Reckoning Part 1&quot; left off. In the first act, POTUS Sloane is faced with tough decisions as the US nukes were fast becoming the next target of being controlled by the Entity. Meanwhile, Hunt was deep into planning with his group -- Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and the master thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) -- to rescue Paris (Pom Klementieff) from prison in order to get to Gabriel (Esai Morales).  We already learned in the last film that the key will be used to access the source code of Entity in the doomed Russian submarine Sevastopol. The second act was dedicated to how Ethan was able to locate the sunken sub and the extreme perils he faced to do his mission. Cruise&#x27;s 20-minute long underwater stunt scene, as the sub was precariously slipping off its ledge with the torpedoes inside all falling down, gave us all an intense experience of drowning panic. The third act told of how Ethan was going to insert Luther&#x27;s Poison Pill (which was in Gabriel&#x27;s possession) into the drive containing the Entity source code, while a countdown to global nuclear annihilation was fast winding down. To top the final stunt in the last film of train cars falling into a ravine, the finale here was a breathtaking &quot;dogfight&quot; of biplanes in the skies. Again, Cruise impressed with these spectacular, wild and crazy mid-air stunts.  This is supposedly the final installment of a film franchise that started 29 years ago in 1996, the first film directed by suspense master Brian de Palma. Aside from Cruise and Rhames, it also featured Henry Czerny as IMF director, now CIA director Eugene Kittridge. This new film had several callbacks from the first film like Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), and IT William Donloe (Rolf Saxon) from the iconic Vault scene, including the knife that fell on the table. If he gave the last film had a rather humorous tone, director Christopher McQuarrie got lot more serious in this new one. The whole first hour was practically just a lot of talking. The first car chase scene was only seen in the last hour of this new one. Here, the fate of the whole world lay on the hands of a selected few, so the focus was on several decisions requiring intense moral discernment and judgment that needed to be made. Tom Cruise&#x27;s Ethan Hunt had certainly matured from that cocky young agent we first met in 1996. Compared to &quot;Dead Reckoning&quot; and &quot;Top Gun Maverick,&quot; here Cruise himself looked like his age has finally caught up with his eternally youthful screen persona. However, you would not see that age from the elaborate stunts Cruise gave his all for in this one. For these alone, &quot;The Final Reckoning&quot; deserves to be watched on the biggest screens. <div> </div>This review was originally published in the author&#x27;s blog, “<a href="https://said-fred.blogspot.com/2025/05/review-of-mission-impossible-final.html">Fred Said</a>.”

'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' deserves to be watched on the biggest screens.

'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' deserves to be watched on the biggest screens.