Ethan Hunt’s story is now over, supposedly — and early watchers are responding to the last Mission: Impossible installment.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the final film in the spy action franchise, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday and received a five-minute standing ovation. The film was directed by Christopher McQuarrie with a budget nearing $400 million. Leading up to the highly anticipated movie’s release, Tom Cruise‘s jaw-dropping stunts like him holding on the side of a helicopter and the under water sequence has been promoted on the film’s social media and the star’s own account.
Final Reckoning begins a couple of months after 2023’s Dead Reckoning ends. Hunt (Cruise) and the IMF team are on a mission to stop Gabriel Martinelli (Esai Morales) from getting access to the world-ending rogue artificial intelligence known as “The Entity.” Simon Pegg, Angela Bassett, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny and Pom Klementieff round out the cast.
As of Thursday, the film sits at an 82 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It officially hits theaters on May 23, by Paramount, the same day as the live-action Lilo & Stitch. The two projects are expected to earn the biggest Memorial Day box office sales in history. Below, read on to know what critics are saying in the first reviews of the movie.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic, David Rooney, praised Cruise‘s performance in his review, “Cruise’s commitment to performing his own stunts and giving audiences the analog thrill of in-camera daredevilry instead of digital fakery has progressed to ever more astonishing feats over the course of eight Mission: Impossible movies. It’s the key reason for this franchise’s longevity — along with the self-destructing mission instructions, the identity-switching facemasks, the heroic sprints and the high-speed vehicular chases.” However, he ultimately felt, “The Final Reckoning ends up being a bit on the dull side. If it’s going to be the last we see of one of the most consistently entertaining franchises to come out of Hollywood in the past few decades — a subject about which Cruise and McQuarrie have remained vague — it’s a disappointing farewell with a handful of high points courtesy of the indefatigable lead actor.”
USA Today‘s movie critic Brian Truitt wrote, “Overall, there’s an Avengers: Endgame feel to Final Reckoning, throwing back to plot points and characters from previous films.” Elsewhere, the publication stated, “If The Final Reckoning is indeed at hand, you couldn’t ask for a better death-defying, free-falling, edge-of-your-dang-seat sendoff.”
Vulture‘s movie critic Bilge Ebiri wrote, “Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining, if still messy, Mission: Impossible movie. It achieves this by tuning out the broody chatter of its first act and giving us a lengthy, ingenious (and refreshingly silent) sequence inside a sunken submarine, a wreck whose unstable spot on the sea floor ensures that our hero will wind up bouncing and rolling around a room inconveniently filled with floating torpedoes.”
The New York Times‘ chief film critic Manohla Dargis wrote, “Male-driven action movies often have a savior complex, with heroes who are beaten and brutalized only at last to rise vengefully triumphant. Final Reckoning leans hard into that familiar theme — the team faces betrayal, the fate of everyone on Earth is in Ethan’s hands — which gives the movie a quasi-religious dimension. That’s weird, no doubt, but there’s something plaintive about Ethan’s fight this time because it echoes the urgent struggles of workers in the entertainment industry (and everywhere else) to prevent their replacement by artificial intelligence. For years, Cruise has put on a very good show pretending to nearly die for our pleasure; now, though, his body really does seem on the line.”
Despite the film’s promotion of its action sequences, IndieWire‘s reviews editor and head film critic, David Ehrlich, surprising wrote, “The longest Mission: Impossible movie ever has, by far, the least action to offer in return.” The film’s run time is nearly three hours long.
Time magazine’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek criticized its story as its biggest issue, writing, “It’s big, extravagant, and at times very beautiful to look at. The story is the problem: packed with expository dialogue, it feels as if it were written to be digested in 10- or 15-minute bites. Characters robotically repeat significant McGuffiny phrases. The Rabbit’s Foot! The Anti-God! The Doomsday Vault! Final Reckoning doesn’t flow; it lurches forward in a series of information-delivery packets. If you’ve seen the first half of this double whammy, 2023’s conveniently titled Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, but forgotten what the hell it was all about, you needn’t worry. You could queue up Final Reckoning at home, go out to walk the dog, and get caught up in a snap when you return. And how cinematic is that?“
YouTube critic Jeremy Jahns spoke highly of those “epic” stunts in his review, “When I say this is a stunt work showcase I mean it and we’re right there to where it almost feels like to its detriment. But the stunts are so fucking entertaining and well executed you can’t help but have fun while watching … that plane scene was absolutely epic, the tension was real,” he said. “Mission Impossible may have started out being basically American James Bond, it’s ended somewhere between Bond and Fast & Furious, somewhere in between those two. Mission Impossible has leaned into itself, it’s leaned into the meme. Tom Cruise running montage videos on YouTube, this movie gives them more clips for the next one even when it doesn’t make any sense.”