The Media Tourist

Tom Cruise goes out with a slam-bang in his supposedly last installment of the iconic big-screen spy-action franchise

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning
Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg & Esai Morales
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, May 31

In this eighth (and ostensibly final) installment of the big-screen franchise, which revived the deep-dish espionage of the iconic 1960s TV series in the ‘90s, Tom Cruise reprises his starring role as Ethan Hunt, a rogue IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agent faced with another seemingly “impossible” task— to save the world from annihilation by an all-consuming truth-eating digital parasite known as The Entity.

How’s he going to do it? “We’ll figure it out,” he says.

Figuring it out is a bit of a challenge for the audience in this nearly three-hour spectacle loaded with gravitas, self-reflection, doomsday vibes, loads of expository blather and a couple of show-stopping stunt sequences. The plot is crazily confusing, its cup runneth over with actors from previous films, and there’s a lot of talking—about what’s happening, what happened, and what it all means. In case you’ve forgotten, it throws in some greatest hits of Mission: Impossible movie highlights from the past two decades.

But when Cruise takes a deep dive to the bottom of the icy Barren Sea, to find a digital doodad left behind in a sunken Soviet sub clinging precariously to the edge of a bottomless abyss, or when he dangles with derring-do in a grand finale involving two dueling biplanes in the skies over South Africa, well, such preposterously complicated, supremely slam-bang stunt stuff makes you forget about the movie’s more, ahem, tedious passages. In case you haven’t heard, Cruise proudly does his own stunts, and in these two extended scenes, he earns a couple more gold stars—and shows where some of the film’s reported budget of $400 million went.

Hayley Atwell returns as Grace, the former thief now turned IMF agent. There’s Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, as Ethan’s closest friends and allies. Pom Kiementieff takes a break from playing the alien creature Mantis in Marvel Guardian of the Galaxy movies to return as Paris, the French assassin with a vendetta for Gabriel (Esai Morales), who holds the key—literally—to The Entity. Angela Bassett is the U.S. president, who finds herself in a very tough geo-political spot.

If you’re looking for how the movie nods directly toward its predecessors, there’s the character played by Shea Whigam, from Boardwalk Empire, who traces the intellectual property’s genetic line all the way back to its TV roots. And hey, is that Nick Offerman as a high-ranking military general, and Ted Lasso’s Hannah Wadingham as a Navy official trying to prevent World War III? Yep!

At one point, Ethan is told that “Everything you are, everything you’ve done, has come to this.” That’s certainly true with Tom Cruise and his new Mission: Impossible, which makes a point of reminding us of its impressive run of big-screen escapism across nearly 20 years.  

The movie, which began filming back in 2022, hits screens at a time when its storyline feels especially linked to our contemporary world, with modern worries about AI and cyberspace, fraught international relations and the possibility of nuclear self-destruction. And it doesn’t appear like we can count on Ethan Hunt to come along anymore, hanging from an airplane wing or escaping from a submarine torpedo tube, to save the day.

But then again, you never know… And as we’ve learned in the movies, nothing is impossible!

—Neil Pond