Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B
Special Effects: A-

If you’re a Gen-Xer feeling nostalgic for movies featuring Tom Cruise in his underwear, then boy, is this your lucky weekend! He spends a lot of time in his underwear in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. I can only assume he’s eager for us all to see how fit he still is at the age of 62. With a net worth of nearly $900 million, this guy can surely afford all the necessary personal trainers and nutritionists he might need, and still I shudder to think of the time and effort that must go into maintaining a body like that. Plus, he needs that body for all the stunt work he famously does himself. I’m 49 and I can barely get up from a sitting position without groaning in pain.

Still, I’m a little stuck on the screentime Cruise spends in nothing but tight boxer briefs in this movie. At first, Ethan Hunt is running on a treadmill to prepare for a deep sea dive. Of course one of many expendable villains attacks him, and we get a fight scene entirely choreographed with Cruise in his boxer briefs. It’s like the Mission: Impossible version of the fight scene in Eastern Promises, except Cruise doesn't have the courage to go totally naked. Don’t be such a coward, Tom! You’re known for movie stunts, after all—why not truly shock everyone by going full frontal? Maybe his scrotum is the only part of his body with enough wrinkles to make him actually look his age.

A few scenes later, Ethan strips down again, this time as part of his narrow escape from a crashed submarine rolling off an ocean floor cliff. This is how we get the iconic shot of him in the fetal position, floating toward any iced-over ocean surface. Admittedly, it’s a beautiful shot, and all that bare skin effectively adds to the visual impact. This is, in fact, one of the things that impressed me most about The Final Reckoning—Fraser Taggart’s cinematography. Taggart has only four feature film credits as Cinematographer, but his last one was 2023’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (Part One in 2023; now just Dead Reckoning since they changed their mind about the name of this year’s movie, its own release date delayed several times, the final delay due to the 2023 actors’ strike). There are two different signature set pieces in The Final Reckoning, and the biplane chase is clearly getting the most attention. But I was most wowed by the rolling ocean-floor submarine sequence, in which Ethan is in and out of water depending on the compartment he’s in, and water flowing from one compartment to another is what causes the submarine to tilt. This sequence has a great deal of fantastic camera work, the angle we see frequently off kilter from what is actually up or down for Ethan, giving us a visceral sense of his own spatial confusion. The missiles that also roll around or fall into the water just to complicate things is icing on the cake.

This is, after all, what we come to Mission: Impossible movies for. It wasn’t so much the case in the franchise’s early years—the first Mission: Impossible was released in 1996, and although it did have some enduringly famous set pieces of its own (the wire heist; the leap from an exploding helecopter to a train—honestly the dumbest looking stunt in the entire franchise), it spent a lot more time on spycraft and, particularly in the wire heist scene, suspense. As the films have gone on, now 29 years of them, on average they have gotten better as they went. Mission: Impossible II was the most forgettable, and then, for me at least, Dead Reckoning was the first since then to dip slightly.

And this is where I seem to break from the critical consensus—people really loved Dead Reckoning two years ago, but while I still found it very entertaining, I also found it overlong (2 hours and 43 minutes is about 40 minutes too many) and too reliant on rehashing set piece concepts from earlier movies. What’s more, the visual effects during the train crash scene were too obviously CGI, to a degree not as noticeable since the aforementioned helicopter explosion in the first film.

Thus, I find myself surprised at how the critical consensus on The Final Reckoning is less enthusiastic, and yet I found myself enjoying it more. To me, this film is closer to a return to form—utterly preposterous story, sure, but the set pieces are genuinely amazing, worth the price of admission on their own. What’s more, much like Dead Reckoning, Christopher McQuarrie (who has now directed the last four of these movies) doesn’t bother wasting any of the best action on the cold open, which here has smaller stakes than in earlier films. It still opens with a clever escape, but it’s just a taste of what’s to come, a sign of better storytelling.

Granted, The Final Reckoning is also overlong (2 hours and 49 minutes is about 45 minutes too many), evidently to allow enough space for its convoluted plotting. As in the last film, this one lacks any villain with personality, because the villain is AI, or rather “The Entity,” which is somehow breaching global nations’ nuclear arsenals one by one, with the threat of igniting a nuclear war that will annihilate humanity. We do get U.S. cabinet discussions about “strategic strikes” against eight targets worldwide, as if that has any rationale at all when it would make the planet uninhabitable. Notwithstanding the objective idiocy of the premise of these movies, it’s still nice to fantasize about Angela Bassett as the U.S. President rather than the genuine dipshit president we actually have. Bassett effortlessly commands respect, at least.

The Final Reckoning works overtime to tie all the previous films together, just as Dead Reckoning did; this time we get yet another key character returning from the first film from 1996. As always, we get unlikely heroes, and Ethan loses someone he has long cared about. Given the nature of this entire franchise, the writing is serviceable but never what we come for; what it delivers are true thrills beautifully shot (my one cinematgraphy complaint being how frequently characters stand in just the right spot for just their eyes not to be in shadow). It may be too long, but it’s never dull.

McQuarrie and Cruise do give us a somewhat curious ending this go-round, something that feels very much by design: long running characters get their own moment onscreen, as if sayiny goodbye. But the story ends with nothing preventing a return to this universe of endless stunts yet again, except maybe Tom Cruise’s age. His physical prowess is still incredible, but he can only maintain that for so much longer. Maybe the next Mission: Impossible will finally find someone to pass the baton to, even if Cruise returns in something more of a supporting role. The possibilities are endless, and there’s no reason not to think this franchise will be too.

*Ethan Hunt covered from head to toe—but it doesn’t last long!*

Overall: B+