Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning – Friday 23rd May 2025

I just got back from watching the latest Mission Impossible, so my thoughts are fresh.

Ugh. What a disappointment.

The series peaked with number 5 (Rogue Nation), and they’ve been getting progressively worse since then, culminating in what is being touted as the last Mission Impossible movie.

Disclaimer: I am a big fan of Tom Cruise. The guy is a living legend, and I really wanted to like this movie, but it was just bad on a very basic level, despite how impressive Tom Cruise’s stunts were (and they were very impressive!).

The entire movie is a series of set-pieces, where the stakes are so high, that failure results in the end of the world! There’s absolutely no levity in this film, whatsoever, it’s just purely fatalistic!
Scene after scene of ‘life or death’ situations gets pretty tiresome; proof that a movie made up entirely of ‘third act climaxes’ is dull as dishwater.

I mean, there’s literally no arc or development for any of the characters, and each character, apart from the protagonist and his sidekick ‘Benjy’, is an inferior version of characters from the previous movies. They are completely devoid of any traits or personality.

When you don’t care about the characters, then you don’t care about the story.

Then there’s the editing.

They should have called this film ‘Cut To: Flashback – The Movie’

I swear, they must have set a record for the number of callbacks and flashbacks in a single movie!

It was so annoying!

A character can’t speak without the film inserting a flashback of whatever they’re referring to, as if this film is made for an audience of amnesiacs who watch movies while they’re doom-scrolling!

The film begins and ends with characters delivering long monologues to the audience, telling us about how great Ethan Hunt (and thus, Tom Cruise) is, and how the world would be better if we were as self-less as him, etc etc. Because, the world is so divided right now. Er, no it’s not! The entire planet can agree on one thing: politicians and the wealthy elite are the problem.

Speaking of villains, the mysterious A.I. ‘Entity’ and its lackey ‘Gabriel’ were SO fcuking sh!t! The equivalent would be a boomer writing a story about how Tik Tok is going to end the world! The fact that they tarnished the other films in the franchise, to somehow coalesce the story into some grand arc, like it was Avengers Endgame or something, was desperate and unnecessary.

The whole thing was just a shame.

The biggest shame being that the filmmakers, McQuarrie and Cruise, are so far removed from objectivity, that they’re convinced that this film, as well as the last one, are actually good!

Sigh. With Hollywood churning out expensive crap, after expensive crap, and A.I. generating life like video in minutes, so audiences can create their own custom-made slop, maybe cinema really is dead.

Ah well, at least we still have each other.