Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning
Apple Cinemas Xtreme
Hartford
May 23, 2025
Somehow, with very few people noticing, there have been seven Mission: Impossible movies.
The eighth entry in the series, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, promises to be the last one in the three decades-old franchise. The buildup has been massive, with Tom Cruise appearing on every television show, social media platform and random movie theater imaginable to promote the film.
I’m happy to say that the swan song for the franchise lives up to the marketing blitz. Final Reckoning is a fun, frantic and surprisingly emotional sendoff for the series.
FR picks up in medias res, as the Maguffin from the last few movies warps into an AI system that threatens to destroy humanity with its own nuclear weapons. The only way to save everyone is for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his crack team to race around the globe, looking for the various parts of a “poison pill” that will destroy the AI, known as The Entity, once and for all.
Of course, the big draw for Mission: Impossible movies is seeing what new level of insanity Cruise will push his stunt work to. Thanks to the aforementioned marketing, pretty much everyone is aware of the stunt work Cruise did with the two biplanes in midair. Knowing about the sequence, though, and watching it play out are completely different matters. I was on the edge of my seat, wondering how they pulled off what looked like impossible stunts.
That’s just one part of the movie. Other spectacular set pieces have been less exposed, and for my money there’s one in particular that even outshines the airplane battles. I’m not going to spoil it, but I will say that the sense of claustrophobia it evokes was palpable, and added a tenseness that I can still feel in my muscles.
The magic of Mission: Impossible is that, several times, I found myself wondering what was real and what was CGI. Unlike most movies, in which such questions are a compliment to the digital technology, here it s an acknowledgment of the incredible stunt work from both the cast and crew. The fight scenes are more visceral, and environmental challenges lead to death defying sequences that I’m going to have a tough time getting out of my head this weekend.
Mission: Impossible is a deeply human franchise. The team has changed over 30 years, but the core of Cruise, Ving Rhames as Luther Stickwell and Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn endures to the final movie. Angela Bassett, Nick Offerman, Tramell Tillman and more round out an ensemble cast that is forced to wrestle with the mistakes of the past and the horrors of the present to ensure that humanity has a future. Old enemies become new allies, and a truly touching monologue at the end of the movie ties together 30 years of movies that pushed the technological envelope with a humanistic bow on top.
The Final Reckoning earns every minute of its nearly three-hour run time, and never feels like a drag. You need to experience the thrills and chills firsthand. Whether you’re new to the franchise or you’ve been with Ethan from the beginning, you need to accept this mission and get to a theater.
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Jamil is taking the weekend off. See you next week!
