- UK release: May 2025
- Director: Christopher McQuarrie · Writers: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; Skydance; TC Productions
- Genre: Espionage action thriller · Runtime: 169 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Tom Cruise (Top Gun, Mission: Impossible - Fallout) as Ethan Hunt; Hayley Atwell (Captain America: The First Avenger) as Grace; Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction) as Luther Stickell; Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Star Trek) as Benji Dunn; Esai Morales (La Bamba) as Gabriel
- IMDb: 7.6 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 80% critics / 93% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Twenty-nine years after Ethan Hunt first dropped on a wire into a vault in Langley, the series arrives at the entry the title insists is the end of the road. The Final Reckoning is the eighth Mission: Impossible film, the second to be split off from a single shoot with Dead Reckoning (2023), and the fourth Christopher McQuarrie has directed in a row. By now Cruise and McQuarrie have turned this franchise into the last reliable home of the big practical stunt, and the question hanging over the picture is whether a series built on a man clinging to the outside of fast-moving objects can also carry the weight of a finale. Mostly it can, though it has to pause and explain itself rather more than it used to.
The setup
The threat is the Entity, the rogue artificial intelligence introduced last time, a self-authoring program that has burrowed into the world’s networks and is steadily seizing the keys to every nuclear arsenal on the planet. Ethan Hunt holds the only means of controlling it, which makes him the most wanted man alive and the only person every government is trying to either recruit or kill. Around him the familiar IMF unit reassembles, with Grace (Hayley Atwell), the pickpocket from the previous film, now folded into the team, while Gabriel (Esai Morales), the Entity’s human instrument, stays a step ahead. The race runs from frozen wreckage on the seabed to a final scramble in the air, and the stakes are flatly apocalyptic: stop the machine before it decides the human race is a rounding error.
The cast
Cruise plays Ethan Hunt now as a man worn by the job rather than energised by it, and the film leans into that fatigue. It suits him. Atwell remains the best new addition the series has made in years, quick and watchable, giving Grace a nervous competence that plays well against Hunt’s certainty. Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise present since 1996, anchors the emotional register as Luther, and the film knows exactly how much that continuity is worth. Simon Pegg keeps Benji as the audience’s nerves made audible, less comic relief here than worried conscience. Esai Morales is a coldly elegant antagonist, though Gabriel is more a function of the plot than a character you fear. The wider ensemble, government and military figures circling Hunt, is large enough that some of them blur.
The craft
The set pieces are why anyone buys a ticket, and on that count McQuarrie and his stunt team deliver. A long sequence inside a sunken submarine, all shifting angles and rising water, is the most genuinely tense thing the series has staged in years, claustrophobic in a way no amount of green screen could fake. The closing biplane chase, with Cruise out on the wing of an aircraft in open sky, is the kind of lunatic spectacle the franchise has made its signature, and Fraser Taggart shoots it with enough clarity that you can read every beat. Eddie Hamilton’s editing keeps the action legible, which sounds like faint praise until you remember how rarely modern blockbusters manage it. The score by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey threads Lalo Schifrin’s old theme through the noise without overplaying it. The cost is length: at 169 minutes, the film spends a good deal of its first hour reminding you who everyone is and what the Entity wants, and the exposition sits heavily.
How it stacks up
Set beside Fallout (2018), still the high-water mark of the run, this is the more ponderous film. Fallout moved like a shark; The Final Reckoning keeps stopping to take stock of itself, and the self-mythologising, callbacks to earlier entries, a recurring sense that the series is grading its own legacy, will reward devotees more than newcomers. As a piece of AI-apocalypse storytelling it is closer to the dread of the Terminator films than to anything cerebral, the Entity functioning as a faceless doomsday clock rather than a genuine idea. But on pure craft and nerve the submarine and the biplane belong in the franchise’s top tier, and the closure it offers, after eight films, feels earned rather than tacked on.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed around 80%, warm but more measured than they were for Fallout, praising the stunt work and Cruise’s commitment while flagging the runtime, the heavy exposition and the franchise’s tendency to salute itself. Audiences are notably more enthusiastic, sitting up at 93%, which tracks: if you have followed Hunt across three decades, the things critics call indulgent are precisely the things you came for. I sit closer to the audience. The plotting is baggy and the villain underpowered, but the set pieces are extraordinary, and a finale that actually lets the saga rest is worth a good deal.
Verdict
This is not the leanest Mission: Impossible, and a sharper edit would have made it a better film. But it does the two things this series exists to do: it puts a real human being in real danger in front of a real camera, and it makes you believe the world might end if he fails. The submarine sequence alone is worth the admission, the biplane finale sends the franchise off in style, and the espionage-meets-rogue-AI premise hits enough of my own buttons that the longueurs are forgivable. As a closing chapter to one of the few blockbuster series still made by hand, it lands. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest IMAX screen you can reach; the submarine and aerial sequences were built for it.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film closed Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie’s two-part Dead Reckoning / Final Reckoning arc and was positioned as Ethan Hunt’s farewell, though the series’ future remains a matter of speculation rather than announcement. It reached UK digital platforms over the summer and arrived on 4K Blu-ray and DVD in October 2025; it currently streams on Paramount+ depending on your region. Seen back to back with Fallout, the contrast holds up: the earlier film is the tighter thriller, this one the bigger send-off.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, injury detail, threat, language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There is frequent, impactful action violence which includes shootings, hand-to-hand combat, stabbings, and limb breaks with occasional bloody detail. People are tasered, body-slammed, and a man’s face is held against the moving belt of a treadmill.
Threat and horror: There are chase scenes, kidnappings, threats of violence, and explosions. In other scenes, a room of people is knocked unconscious with poison gas, people drown during a sea vessel explosion, and an AI entity threatens to drop nuclear weapons across the world. People are seen in dangerous situations like dangling from moving trains and aeroplanes, and a diver encounters various dangers underwater, including being trapped on a sinking vessel, and passing out whilst resurfacing.
Injury detail: A meat cleaver is seen sticking out of a man’s chest, there are unsettling close-ups of frozen corpses, occasional bloody images in the aftermath of violence, and a scene in which a person strikes their head on the tail of a plane. There is also a visually discreet scene depicting the removal of a bullet from a man’s chest, followed by a straw being inserted into his lung.
Language: Moderate language (‘dickhead’, ‘son of a bitch’) is accompanied by milder terms such as ‘ass’, ‘shit’, ‘bastard’, ‘hell’, ‘God’ and ‘damn’.
Flashing/flickering lights: This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
