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.
The plot of Mission Impossible 8 involves this thing called "The Entity", AKA, "the Anti-God", a would-be Skynet, taking over the world with its terrifying AI processing power. It threatens nuclear annihilation because that’s what evil AI systems do in movies. It always goes back to Judgment Day. We therefore find ourselves making the subtext text, Tom Cruise is literally fighting AI, which is apparently the future of filmmaking whether you like it or not, with his brand of reckless physical stunts and hot dog sky antics. He’s arguing he’s the last bastion of truth against un-reality. Nobody else can bring the physicality, the gravitas, and the wisdom to truly entertain audiences with good old-fashioned meat and potatoes spectacle. And maybe Tom Cruise is right, maybe he is special and unique. I’d just believe him more if he spent more time in this newest movie… you know, actually being entertaining. We spend more time talking about how cool the stunts were versus actually doing the stunts.
Characters keep saying in The Final Reckoning that "we’re living in The Entity’s reality now". Since all exposition in this film is repeated at least three times, you will hear that line a lot. But Mission Impossible is not about The Entity’s reality, this is Tom Cruise’s reality.
Early on Ethan Hunt straps himself into a kind of digital coffin to talk directly to The Entity. The edit on Mission Impossible 8 is very messy, full of repeated shots and what feel like rewrites, so ultimately this scene is just to establish what heists Hunt and his beloved Team have to complete to finish this movie. When Tom Cruise pops out of the coffin, he’s not sure if he’s back in the real world. "Is this real?" he asks his co-stars. And my Hack Screenplay Twist-alarm went off immediately. The worst possible ending had just come into play, where our hero has just been Vanilla Sky’d by the AI into a fantasy world of his delights. The Entity has given him a Chosen One arc and every character is a construct to satisfy his desires in a contrived universe where he alone can save the world. That twist doesn’t happen, thank God or thank the Anti-God.
But could you even tell the difference?
Tom Cruise is literally Vanilla Sky-ing himself just without the computer simulation stuff with this film franchise. He’s in control in front of the camera in the fiction of the universe and in control behind the camera as the producer, and has been the main producer since 1996. It took Cruise five movies until he found his soulmate co-creator, director Christopher McQuarrie. Chris gets to be Tom’s bromance partner who will fly around the world to create every crazy idea his movie star wants to threaten his own life with. And if you could spend hundreds of millions of dollars to live out an adolescent dream of high adventure, beautiful babes, and an entire planet of people worshiping you, needing you, wouldn’t you do that? I’m not sure I could say no to that either. I'd hang off the side of a plane all day and feel like the coolest man in history, why not? I'm a writer, my ego has demands that would terrify you if I dared voice them.
Mission Impossible 8 is not the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It isn’t even the dustiest and saddest blockbuster of 2025: there’s still that Captain America 4 or 5 movie to suffer through. When The Final Reckoning actually wants to be a big action spectacle, it can still be a big action spectacle. There’s a good 90 minute movie hiding in the three hour movie. Ironically it also takes 90 minutes to get to the first good part.
The centerpiece action scene of Final Reckoning has Tom Cruise scuba diving down to steal a computer thingamajig using the thingamajigs he collected in the previous movie. (You can already see how needlessly elaborate all this is, since we’ve traded one plot about two McGuffins for another plot that will eventually also be about two McGuffins.) The current item is hidden deep in the frozen Arctic five hundred feet down within a half-flooded nuclear sub that also rotates on its side for extra platforming challenge. So Ethan Hunt is getting thrown around like socks in a dryer with some very heavy missiles bouncing in the hold ready to explode. Then he has to swim up to surface half-naked, which should kill him a thousand ways if you know anything about pressure and temperature. But who cares about science? This is fun! Movies can be good, you know? I'll even forgive how Christ-like Tom Cruise made this sequence of death and rebirth for the world's sins.
You’d forget that fact – how movies can be good - because to get to this submarine sequence, we have to suffer through a feature film’s length of tedium as The Final Reckoning goes through its motions. First we have to recap everything that happened in seventh movie, while reestablishing all the baroque plot points within. But we also must have five or six speeches about how nobody can be trusted but Ethan Hunt, and Ethan Hunt is so cool, and remember how cool it was when Ethan Hunt did that sweet heist in the CIA building? It is masturbatory to the point that even the Entity gives its own speech about Hunt/Cruise, because the digital AI future we all fear must also secretly be horny for Tom.
To get to that submarine requires a lift from an aircraft carrier and a working submarine, after passing through three flights and a long briefing segment from a council of important-looking government people in suits. What this means is that we have all these great actors reduced to embarrassing simp roles. Angela Bassett, Katy O’Brian, Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, Shae Whingham, Holt McCallany, and Tramell Tillman, all standing in rooms or sitting at tables gazing in awe at the star power of Tom Cruise. Tillman might get the worst of it. You ever wanted to see Mr. Milchick from Severance say a line that basically amounts to saying "oh boy, Mister, you sure are a radical dude!" about nine times?
Couldn’t we have just opened on the damn submarine? Cut past all this? Why was Tom Cruise climbing those rocks in Mission Impossible 2's opening? It never mattered why - just that it was awesome! Can we just do the thing??
Eventually in this newest movie Tom Cruise fights the main human villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales) while doing wing walking in a couple biplanes over Africa and that rules too. I just wish it happened sooner and without the mournful devotion to the old movies. Arrogance is fine, Tom Cruise does arrogance well and he's earned it. Mission Impossible 8 is something worse. There’s a fun daredevil barnstorming show here but I cannot say it is worth suffering through Cruise's third-quarter life crisis to get there.
Tom Cruise is a great leading man, a very good actor, with a varied and fascinating career. Well, he had a varied career, until roughly fifteen years ago when he fell into only doing Movies Where He Runs and basically nothing else. He used to do interesting dramas like Eyes Wide Shut or romances like Jerry Maguire or even good old-fashioned non-action thrillers like The Firm. Not anymore, now Cruise just Runs and Punches. And I won’t complain too much. He is very good at running! Even crummy movies like The Mummy (2017) feature a good Running performance. A lot of people hate Tom Cruise for being a tabloid character and having imperfect relationships and imperfect religious choices, I don’t care about any of that. I don't need to know or like him in real life. He loves what he does, what he does is make movies, and I like watching movies, so it should all work out.
It is curious that Ethan Hunt has become the centerpiece of Cruise’s ego trip, due to being non-specific and having so little reality. Even between movies Ethan Hunt is a different guy. In the first film he's a serious technocrat, in the second film he's a horny himbo jackass, in the third movie he wants to settle down and a have a family, and in the McQuarrie era he's become this Fast & Furious-ish "this is about family, I mean, the team" patriarch guy. Maybe this is an issue for Cruise in general as an
actor. He’s too charismatic and too iconic to disappears into roles. Sometimes he’ll become Lestat, but more likely he’s The Tom Cruise that Mixes Drinks, or The Bad Dad Tom Cruise that Hides from Aliens, or in the case of Ethan Hunt, The Tom Cruise that Does Ludicrous Stunts. That’s
fine, not every actor has to be Tilda Swinton. Tom Cruise has a great smile and swagger and he's in movies for a reason. But Ethan Hunt is not
even Maverick. People will never sob remembering the intense homoerotic
volleyball and Kenny Loggins score when they stop making Mission Impossible movies. Mission Impossible is just too
generic to fit into this grand nostalgia trip for the
Cruises of Yesteryear.
And I don’t think being generic is bad! That used to be this series’ strength! Brian De Palma's film is cold and serious and calculating, a more real spy film than the Brosnan-era Bond movies it was competing against. Then John Woo's take on the series so over-the-top in extremely Year 2000 ways, with so many sweeping camera pans and wind machines I expect the characters to burst into Bollywood song at any moment. The third film has this dark crunchiness in every shot, as JJ Abrams way overdoes the contrast. Mission Impossible never needed to be more than this: an excuse for Tom Cruise to find different directors with unique styles, and where Actor Tom Cruise does something really cool to entertain the audiences. I think the McQuarrie team-up has out-lived its shelf-life, the tone has gotten both consistent, but also, too up its own ass. Tom and Chris already made the best Mission Impossible they can in 2018's Fallout. The only place they could go was into nostalgia, and it is miserable.
When Mission Impossible is reverential to its own past, it misses the point. We don’t need Lore to connect these movies, yet Mission Impossible 8 is obsessed with it. Dead Reckoning rewrites a character to be somebody long lost kid. It rewrites Mission Impossible 3’s McGuffin, which was left purposefully vague because it never mattered what that thing was, to now be a very precise thing that led to X which led to Y which gave us this current crisis. Actors who barely had lines of dialog thirty years ago are back now and suddenly have full subplots. The reboot Bond films made the same mistake, and somehow Mission Impossible 8 has rolled up the worst sins of Quantum of Solace, Spectre, and No Time to Die all at once.
There’s something telling in how Tom Cruise is shirtless so often in Mission Impossible 8 but the camera doesn’t want to linger on his physique. No matter how healthy he is, no matter how much faster he can run than I can, he’s in his Sixties, and he’s getting an old man chest. He's post-Dad Bod into Grandpa Bod. He can’t do the beef cake shots that the dehydrated superhero actors do where their flesh has so many bulges they seem to have invented a few new redundant muscle groups. Tom Cruise also can’t do a romance with his co-star Hayley Atwell anymore. She’ll throw her cleavage on screen and drool at him, she’s doing the job. But they won’t kiss, they won’t bang, they won’t live happily ever after. As this series has progressed, Cruise’s female co-leads have gone from being his own age, to being ten years his junior, to now twenty years his junior. In general, blockbusters are afraid to be horny where they weren’t when Cruise was casually bedding Thandiwe Newton twenty-five years ago, but also, we all know how gross this is. Tom is too old to sex up the screen. He's too old to have that long haircut now. He's starting to look like Neil Breen.
And actually Final Reckoning's paranoid techno thriller messiah fantasy has a lot in common with a Breen film, come to think of it. Hmm.
We need a female co-lead because movies need one, but Ethan Hunt is so voluminous to this movie, that regardless of age, Hayley Atwell’s character is reduced to merely smiling. Her job in the grand climax consists of plugging and unplugging a USB stick while Tom Cruise does all the stunts. No wonder Rebecca Ferguson wanted her character killed off to get out of this franchise. There’s a human villain because The Entity is just not a fun bad guy and movies need a bad guy to punch, but he’s an afterthought too. Esai Morales’ Gabriel should be a match and a rival to Ethan Hunt, a dark opposite to him. Morales is up for that task, he's bringing the ham to the screen. However, there can never be a true dark opposite to something as glorious as Tom Cruise, just as God cannot have an opposite Anti-God, it's a logical fallacy. There’s actually remarkably little in Mission Impossible 8 except nostalgia. There are no other characters of substance despite the movie's insistence the "The Team" are important. There's just Tom, in love with Tom, for Tom's sake.
It isn’t the audience’s nostalgia at this point. I don't believe people are that nostalgic for Mission Impossible 1 or 2 or that one he held onto the side of the jumbo jet taking off. But Tom is that nostalgic. He's sitting back and doing the empty “remember when?” conversations. But he’s not talking to us, not anymore. The audience is incidental, just as the female co-stars are incidental, and the Entity is incidental. Even the stunts feel like a bit like afterthoughts. Mission Impossible 8: The Final Reckoning is the final triumph of ego over the very thing that ego actually did well.
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