'Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning' Has More Ego Than Stunts

If there was ever a franchise that never demanded much out of its audience, it was the Mission Impossible movies. These films came out roughly once every five years, enough time to miss them but also enough to forget they existed. They barely had continuity, their protagonist Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is not really a character. There's all kinds of inconsistencies in tone and style between entries, which is fine. My question is this: are there people out there who have made Mission Impossible their whole personality? Anybody who would be offended if they retconned the end to Mission Impossible: Fallout or something? I like all these movies well enough but I don't remember which one was Rogue Nation and which one was Ghost Protocol. I don't remember why Tom Cruise climbed the Burj Khalifa in the fourth or fifth movie. Jonathan Rhys Meyers was in one of these? Where?

And that’s fine. If anything, that’s admirable. I think it is a series strength to be easy and breezy like a shampoo. Mission Impossible lost that strength when it became 2025 and Tom Cruise was staring down the barrel of a Medicare ID card. Now Mission Impossible is exhausting and pompous. There is one man that did make Mission Impossible his entire personality, and it just so happens to be the guy starring in them. The newest and worst movie in this series, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, is a film starring Tom Cruise in a Tom Cruise production, with only one audience in mind: Tom.

The final entry of the Mission Impossible franchise is so big it had to be split into two movies - the seventh, eighth, and also presumably last films in Ethan Hunt's career. Dead Reckoning, the one with a "Part 1" subtitle, was action-packed and impressive, but still too long and too complicated just to be a movie where Tom Cruise rode a motorcycle off a mountain. Its sequel, The Final Reckoning, curiously lacking a "Part 2" despite being the second half of a mammoth movie, doubles-down hard on the worst instincts of its processor. There's even less thrills, more talking, more plot. But really what strangles this duology is ego. What filled roughly six hours of runtime? A lot of self-worship, a lot of reverence for something that never really mattered. Everybody from low-level spies to the very president of the United States herself must stop and sing how special and important Ethan Hunt is. But there is no Ethan Hunt, even in his own film series he barely exists. He is just whatever Tom Cruise needs to be at the time of filming. It appears that what Cruise needs in 2025 is ungodly levels of self-importance.