Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning (2025) Review: A Test of Anxiety

Tom Cruise’s latest film in the ground-breaking AI-driven action franchise still lives up to its challenge– accepting the impossible mission and somehow making it work.

The eighth action spy film, anchored by Director Christopher McQuarrie, is a direct sequel to its predecessor– Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One, picking up two months after the events that transpired in the first part.

Tom Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt and the IMF team fight to prevent Gabriel (Esai Morales), a vicious assassin, from taking over ‘The Entity’, a renegade artificial intelligence that can potentially kill the planet.

The world’s digital infrastructure is now heavily dominated by AI, which poses a grave threat to international security. Ethan’s goal is to obtain the elements required to deactivate the Entity in order to halt it.

To create a gadget that can permanently turn off the AI, Ethan and his crew need to acquire two distinct parts. These elements are connected to the Russian submarine ‘Sevastopol’, which was sunk and contains the Entity’s source code. The ‘Podkova’ is a device that he must obtain and give to his arch-nemesis, Gabriel, in order to preserve society.

In addition to Cruise and Morales, returning Mission: Impossible characters include Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), the charismatic thief-turned-IMF agent Grace (Hayley Atwell), Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), and Paris (Pom Klementieff). 

Former CIA director and now President of The United States, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) reprises her role as she navigates the inevitable looming threat of world destruction, while betting on Hunt to save the world on time, but simultaneously preparing for the possibility to annihilate millions of human beings in top cities around the globe to save million others. 

There are also some unexpected breathtaking scenes featuring the strength of the Inuit people, as this story revisits a ghost from the past– William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), a CIA analyst who was last seen in the first film being transferred to Alaska. Donloe is married to Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk), an Inuit woman, who plays a silent yet crucial role in helping Hunt secure the devices.

The first half hour of the film focused on negotiation tactics and dry humour, almost making me think this movie might not have too much action. But then the pace picked up and the focus remained purely on Tom’s stunt abilities. And at 62, let me tell you– he still got it!

This movie features some stunning cinematography– most notably a 20-minute sequence underwater in which Hunt is out to locate the ‘Podkova’ in a race against time before his body shuts down. Then there is a scene of Hunt dangling off a plane, overhead picturesque lush green mountains in South Africa, at one point even precariously jumping onto a second jet.

Some of the underwater sequences and the dangerous, albeit daring plane shots were unnecessarily elongated and intentionally captured at an angle that will make you truly anxious.Whether it was testing Hunt’s ability to breathe underwater while simultaneously tracing the source code or his balancing act to stay afloat high up in the air, it was incredibly stressful. So anxious that the person sitting beside me had her face in her hands, eyes wide shut and was massaging her head. But some others just laughed and enjoyed all of it. Perspective.

Personally, I enjoyed the movie– whether you pick the one from 1996 or the latest 2025 installment, Tom Cruise delivers a phenomenal performance with a bang each time without fail. Even if it’s the most impossible mission to achieve. This one is no exception.