Up until 2023, I hadn't seen a single Mission: Impossible film. Like many other beloved movies and shows of decades past, I wasn't intentionally avoiding the franchise; I simply hadn't gotten around to it yet. But with Dead Reckoning on the horizon over the summer, my husband and I committed to watching (for him, rewatching) the first six movies before going to see the new one that year.
I went into the experience expecting to enjoy myself and emerged with a newfound appreciation for Tom Cruise's endless, increasingly wild stunt work (and, at last, an understanding of the origin of that ridiculous run he's always doing). Dead Reckoning ended up being one of my favorite movies of the summer. It was thrilling, fun, and left me wanting more -- exactly as intended.
After rewatching the movie again before last Friday, I was as hyped as I'd been for a new mega-franchise movie in a long time. And The Final Reckoning did not disappoint. I've learned that you have to go into these kinds of things with an aim to enjoy rather than immediately criticize. In all honesty, if you pick apart this movie too much, it starts to feel a little disjointed, rushed, and over-the-top -- not necessarily in a good way. So for this one, I'm not looking at details. I'm simply here to be entertained.
Which is, I'd like to believe, what everyone involved had in mind. How do you really top the most recent Mission: Impossible film with yet another one? You just go for it. You "go there." You establish the Entity-worshipping cult. You send Cruise into the deep depths of the ocean and have him start taking all his gear off, in stages, naturally. You only kill off one major legacy character, but you don't really give audiences time to think too deeply about that because, hello, the world is ending and Cruise has more stunts to do.
The final action sequence wasn't the moment I accepted that this was all complete nonsense in the best way possible, but it certainly solidified it for me. A literal ticking time bomb isn't enough -- it never is -- so let's add hand-to-hand combat on a plane, simultaneous with making sure to cut the right wire at the right time, holding a flash drive, while someone else is about to die from a somewhat unrelated collapsed lung. This is so over-the-top that it's almost not good, but it's actually fantastic. We may never get to experience chaos quite to this degree, with this group of agents, ever again. Savor it. Remember it.
The Final Reckoning is a much-needed reminder that movies don't always have to make sense. In fact, sometimes movies are best when they don't. This film had one goal: To give us a good time in this universe, maybe for the last time. A perfect way to launch what should be a fun moviegoing season. Because what we all need right now, more than anything else, is to just let entertainment do what it's designed to do: Purely entertain us, whether the movie is the best one you've ever seen or not.