Mission: Still Possible (Just Less Fun)

My favourite franchise comes to a spectacular if bloated end. Cruise, the adrenalised Peter Pan, is still pushing the entertainment as death-wish envelope, but the joie de vivre is starting to fade.

Welcome friends, thanks for coming back again. I very much appreciate it.

I’m going through a rather unsettled period right now - flat hunting, job hunting, course attending—has meant my writing schedule has been sporadic. I also had one of those three-day migraines that gets to the point of feeling like razorblades through the frontal lobes, and the painkillers induce a kind of foggy, delirious exhaustion.

I wanted to get an article out that I’ve been working on about the relationship between cinema-going and film education. It’s something of a response to - and development of - the question of improving cinema-going. This has been a Film Stack preoccupation of late, but also obviously part of the focus of the Cinema Body / Cinema Mind section of this Substack. I feel like it needs a little more research and writing time, though.

In the meantime, I wanted fire out some thoughts on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning which I saw on Monday at Hackney Picture house. Screen 1 there is huge with the one of the best racked seating configurations, so it was looking forward to seeing Cruise and co extreme escapades.

So, this is a somewhat off-the-cuff reaction to what’s being billed as the series finale. There are spoilers-but in all honesty, it doesn’t matter. You kinda know what happens.

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Aerial insanity is a signature of M:I

Mission: Impossible is my favourite movie franchise. No question. And I’m fully aware that my affection for it is laced with a kind of hypocrisy - one that allows me to revel in its elaborate nonsense, its precision-engineered formula, its slick, self-aware commitment to high-end, mass-market cinematic entertainment, while scoffing at the repetitive, pandering emptiness of other blockbuster series.

I do have rationale though.

M:I is ridiculous, yes. But it knows it's ridiculous, and it leans into that while, at it’s best, committing to the gravity of its situations. Everyone believes in the bit.

While it's based on a TV show, the Mission: Impossible series never became enslaved to a dense, multi-platform intertextuality in the way so many comic book franchises have. There isn’t really an expanded universe to decode. You don’t need to watch three films and two streaming spin-offs to understand the stakes. Each entry works, more or less, as a standalone piece, while still feeding the sense of overarching mythos and if you're inclined to trace it.

There’s a kind of two-tier semiotic hierarchy at work in contemporary franchises. On the one hand, you’ve got the Marvel-style fan ecosystems, , intertextuality, and winking in-jokes. On the other hand, Mission: Impossible aims for a broad, democratic mode of address. It’s cinematic-everyone. It speaks to the universal language of physical spectacle, exotic locations, and Cruise running in suits.

Having said all that, this final film the Final Reckoning (or Dead Reckoning) by stint of it being a sequel does require you to have seen the first instalment of this series dénouement. And there lies one of the issues, that the problems of the first film, in terms of narrative set up come back to handicap this one.

But more of that later.

The M:I films rely on structure, rhythm, and a choreography of chaos that’s grounded in the classical genre of the espionage thriller, but that’s ground in hyperreal present. They sit in a sweet spot in the nexus between Bond (the TV series was a direct response the success of Bond) and Bourne, but also drawing from the lineage of classic espionage thrillers such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Cruise as Ethan Hunt in M:I Ghost Protocol with Paula Patton.

And then, of course, there's Hitchcock - who lingers in the DNA of the MI franchise more than most might realise. North by Northwest (1959) and the choreography of near-death, the chase-as-spectacle; Notorious (1946), with its intermingling of espionage and seduction, or The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), where personal jeopardy and global threat interweave. The use of architecture as tension-generating apparatus - scaling walls, dangling from ceilings, being trapped inside surveillance-laden spaces - is straight from Hitchcock’s spatial anxieties.

What makes MI unique is how it synthesises these traditions - high style, physicality, tension, intrigue - into a thorough modern formula but also weirdly timeless. That sense that nothing and no-can trusted is pushed to the limits. Think of the use of masks, which serve to take our anxieties about fake identity and give them a material embodiedness.

Yet, at its best, Mission: Impossible delivers action spectacle that feels grounded - even when it’s ludicrous. The films generally steer clear of excessive CGI, and there’s a clear effort to situate the set-pieces within tactile, recognisable environments: international cities, cold war bunkers, high-speed trains. There's weight, texture, geography. It’s action, therefore has an immersive weight (perhaps something though that’s gone away in the recent films).

And then, of course… there’s Cruise.

His name bestows a watermark of filmmaking and authentically star-powered, auteurist weight. Indeed, as producer, co-writer, and star, it’s telling that Cruise has formed such a close partnership with director Christopher McQuarrie for this franchise. Their dynamic doesn’t fit the director as auteur concept of authorial cinematic. I don’t think anyone would deny that, Cruise is the underlying force.

No one could have reached his level of stardom without shrewd film business savvy. But equally important is his appreciation of cinema-his reputation as a true student of the medium. It’s something he’s referenced (self-promoted) throughout his career, but it has become central to the narrative, likely quite consciously, during the press tour for Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning.

In a wide-ranging Sight and Sound interview, released around the same time as his BAFTA lifetime achievement award, Cruise responds to a question about his formative experiences on set:

“I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t have acting classes. I watched movies. And I was fortunate enough to be on those sets and see the lens choices, what film was, what these marks were. I just kept going to each department and I would sit and watch them work. I was interested in how these films were put together. I would hear [cinematographer on The French Connection (1971)] Owen Roizman’s point of view of cinema, and I’d hear the producer, the director, hair and make-up.”

Tom Cruise in Sight and Sound, May 2025.

There’s a clear desire, through that interview and in other public announcements, to extol a kind of autodidactic ethos - Cruise as the self-made cinematic polymath -which has undeniably propelled him to the commanding position he now occupies. (Even if he does seem to have developed a slightly odd obsession with lenses lately.)

During COVID, when cinema-going ground to a halt, Cruise made headlines via a leaked audio clip in which he yelled at Mission: Impossible crew members for breaking on-set social distancing protocols. A potential PR disaster. But oddly, the moment played in his favour - the moment was read not so much as self-entitled divaism, but as a hard-nosed, almost desperate defence of cinema’s. The M:I production was being held up as a model for how Hollywood could continue under new safety regimes.

He also resisted the pressure to drop Top Gun: Maverick onto streaming, insisting it be released theatrically, regardless of delays. That commitment to the cinematic experience is another tenet of the Cruise cinematic “philosophy”-and one that helped fuel the increasingly grandiose narrative that Cruise was singlehandedly saving cinema.

But when it comes down to it, Cruise’s continued position at the top is, for me, mostly about watchability. That elusive quality. A combination of acting legacy, a body of work spanning nearly every Hollywood genre, and that special sauce of dynamic charisma that Hollywood top stars possess.

Through the MI franchise, that charisma has evolved into something more feverish - a kind of “entertain or die” compulsion. His adrenaline-fuelled insanity has been branded into the franchise’s DNA. It’s become part of the expectation economy: we now demand that Cruise risk life and limb for real. The old-school star doing his own insane stunts becomes the authenticity payload.

Cruise knows exactly how to play with the memes and clichés. Cruise running is now part of popular cultural language. Cruise runs across bridges, through sandstorms, around the worlds great monuments. And the films are self-aware enough to lean into this with a kind of deadpan humour. As the missions get more absurdly impossible, there’s often a moment - usually courtesy of Simon Pegg’s Benji - where Cruise reacts with a look of: really?

Unlike Bond, I genuinely can’t imagine anyone else playing Ethan Hunt.

So, I rewatched M:I – Dead Reckoning a couple of days ago to get myself “up to speed.”

The key plot driver is fairly straightforward: a super-AI known as The Entity is infiltrating and controlling the world’s computer systems (and therefore, everything). To control or kill The Entity, Ethan Hunt and co. need to recover the source code, which is inconveniently trapped in the core of a Russian submarine that sank somewhere in the Arctic. But to access the core, they first need to find a cruciform key - split into two halves - and, of course, there may be fake versions of it floating about.

This rewatch confirmed something I felt upon first viewing: it's a step down from Fallout, and certainly a drop-off from the franchise’s zenith: Rogue Nation. The key ingredients are still there. The airport sequence, for example, has all the hallmarks of a classic M:I action set piece: Hunt caught between competing agents, a ticking clock, misdirection layered over misdirection, and a sense of momentum that feels both balletic and improvised. He’s dodging U.S. intelligence while also contending with The Entity’s rather vague human surrogate, Gabriel (Esai Morales)—a character and plot device that has its issues, but we’ll leave that for now.

To say that the killing off of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust was disappointing would be an understatement. She had become central to the emotional and narrative arcs of the last few films and was a worthy counterpart to Cruise in the action stakes. From her iconic introduction in Rogue Nation, Ferguson brought athleticism, toughness, and feline aloofness to the role - qualities that created a compellingly but ambivalent chemistry with Cruise.

Cruise with Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Fergusson) in M:I Rogue Nation

This decision does feed into Hunt’s increasingly melancholic history of losing women he can’t quite save (more on that theme later). It set up a Sofie’s Choice moment as to who will he save, Faust or a Hayley Atwell’s sparky thief, Grace.

The central problem I had with Dead Reckoning is two-fold, and it definitely carries over to The Final Reckoning - First: the nebulous, abstract nature of The Entity as the antagonist. Second: the sheer volume of exposition required to explain it.

AI is the dystopian flavour of the moment. Mission: Impossible has already cycled through every plausible global threat: rogue terrorists, Russian secret services, shadowy syndicates and rival U.S. intelligence agencies. The idea of an algorithmic intelligence manipulating truth, shaping geopolitics, and pre-empting human agency is very now.

But the problem is this: The Entity’s deliberate opaqueness ends up overwhelming the narrative coherence. The great success of earlier M:I entries was their ability to stitch together outrageous set pieces within a logic that, while ludicrous, held together internally. Here, the omniscient, omni-adaptive, cyber-ghost villain flattens every twist into a foreseen inevitability. Every reversal, counter-reversal, and double-bluff feels less consequential.

It's four-dimensional chess but where every plot conceit is somehow both vital and a MacGuffin at the same time. As a result, that sense of friction that the team must find a way through, is detached from the specificity of the action scenes.

Ironically, this mirrors the feeling of algorithmic tyranny that haunts our digital lives: the creeping suspicion that our choices are predetermined, that we're living inside a gamified system whose rules are invisible but absolute. There’s obviously an relevant parallel here. But in cinematic terms, it become clunky and laboured. If everything can be anticipated by the AI, the it’s difficult psychologically to feel invested in the gravity of any particular moment.

That brings us to the exposition. This is a broader affectation that has infected contemporary mainstream cinema it seems to me. Maybe is comes from executives’ fear that audiences can’t be trusted to engage in any nuanced work of visual interpretation, emotional projection, or narrative inference.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning attempts to get around this with a particularly egregious form of exposition-by-edit: a long soliloquy of information delivered line by line by a rotating cast of grim-faced government officials, the camera cutting dramatically from one to the next. It’s clearly a tactic to maintain momentum while dumping a metric ton of narrative data.

I get it-these kinds of films need a level of world-building that wouldn’t be necessary in European slow cinema. But here, the informational scaffolding is showing.

And yet… there’s still something charming about Part One. A certain lightness remains, offsetting the fact that, yes, the world might be ending (again), but the danger is laced with pleasure. The set pieces are cleverly integrated with the plot mechanics and - especially in the airport sequence - with character establishment. Here we’re introduced to Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a rogue thief not unlike Thandie Newton’s character in M:I 2. The sequence draws on another genres that M:I draws from the caper/heist film.

So, finally to Final Reckoning.

Essentially the film is broken into three acts. After a brief catch-up sequence - about ten minutes - we descend into another extended expositional treadmill. This drags on too way too long and contains another of those editing ping pong sequences; a room full of sombre characters delivering dire prognosis to Angela Basset’s president.

The goal, of course, is to establish the stakes: the world teetering on the brink of nuclear apocalypse, or a techno-anarchic revolution triggered by The Entity’s disinformation campaign.

Cruise is brought back to the CIA, where Angela Bassett (now the President, naturally) must decide whether to let Hunt off the leash, again, to find the source code. Of course this against the advice of a row of straight-laced generals and advisors. There’s a classic M:I line when the President asks Hunt what he needs from her. He replies (and I’m paraphrasing): “I need an aircraft carrier - and authorisation to do whatever I want with it.”

All of this is quite frankly unnecessary. The set up could have easily been delivered within the first 20 minutes, and without the forced heaviness that invests Hunt with an a quasi-religious aggrandisement.

When the action shifts to the submarine sequence, things improve markedly. Yet I felt a heavy dose of déjà vu - narratively it’s almost beat-for-beat The Hunt for Red October. Cruise drops from a helicopter that's running out of fuel, only to be picked up by a deeply unimpressed U.S. submarine captain. Fortunately, Hunt’s found the right man, played in a scene-stealing, moustache-powered turn by Tramell Tillman.

Tillman and his crew help Hunt dive to the sunken Russian sub to retrieve the source-code module; the is the standout part of the film. It’s incredibly staged, presumably in an enormous and eye-wateringly expensive underwater set. The special effects and practical stunt work merge seamlessly, so you don’t get that video game aesthetic that besets some many blockbusters. My brain kept toggling between two thoughts: How did they do that? And how did he do that?

It is genuinely insane what Cruise still puts his body through at 62. But even the sense of incredulous delight one might feel watching a Hollywood megastar risk life and limb for the cause of your entertainment requires narrative stakes. Otherwise, it becomes a one-dimensional stunt show; a 21st-century update of Evel Knievel-style daredevilry.

Indeed, Hunt’s “escape” from the stricken submarine is arguably the film’s most unconvincing moment in narrative terms. It’s ironic that even with all the physical craziness, it was the looser connective tissue of the story that made me question the coherence of the whole enterprise.

Once Hunt has retrieved the source code unit, his goal becomes to download The Entity onto a special digital drive created by Luther. There are several other threads interwoven here, but honestly, they’re not worth unpacking in full. (And doing so would add several pages to what I’d intended to be a snappy, mid-length hot take.) In any case, we end up in a digital bunker in South Africa, where the final showdown plays out.

The final hour - both in its action choreography and its narrative arc - feels like a remix of earlier Mission beats. Hunt ends up chasing Gabriel in a biplane, which he inevitably ends up hanging out. It’s essentially a rehash of the helicopter sequence from the climax of Fallout, with Henry Cavill.

This tension built through cross-cutting with Grace, Benji, and the other team members (accumulated over the past two films) attempting to defuse a nuclear bomb and, at the same time, engineer the exact moment to download The Entity. It’s cut as tightly as you’d expect, and the aerial photography delivers moments of genuine vertigo on the big screen. But again, the parallels with Fallout’s finale are obvious.

Clearly, the writers wanted Final Reckoning to function as a culmination - to pull together thematic threads, returning characters, and plotlines from across the entire series. This move is to create a circular closure, asserting that Hunt has always been on one singular, unbroken quest. And some of this works well, particularly the subtle callbacks to Mission: Impossible I and that iconic vault sequence.

But it’s curious how thoroughly Rebecca Ferguson’s character has been scrubbed from memory - as if she never existed. Especially given how Dead Reckoning actively positioned Grace and Ilsa as emotional counterpoints and part of Hunt’s history with female characters. There were clearly be off-screen reasons for Ferguson not returning (which she has talked about), but in terms of the call backs used The Final Reckoning, her absence was conspicuous.

But the main missing element from Final Reckoning is that old-school frisson of cool danger, stylish tension, and emotional chemistry. There are no dynamically choreographed caper-moments, those joyful reveries to cinematic fantasy-kenetics that, for me, are the signature of the Mission: Impossible films.

The Cruise–Atwell dynamic is undercooked, and there’s one uncomfortable moment where it seems like the film is about to force a romantic beat - then thinks better of it. The elephant in the room is Cruise’s on-screen sexuality: a persistent absence these films prefer to keep at arm’s length.

In the end, Final Reckoning felt a bit like the cinematic equivalent of a legacy rock band doing the hits one more time: familiar riffs, with enough pyrotechnics to distract you from the fact that it’s all been done before. That’s not to say it’s not entertaining - because it is - but there’s little here you haven’t seen before.

Some interesting conceptual strands appear: the weaponisation of misinformation, the apocalyptic decision that Basset’s president is faced with, and the quasi-religious framing of AI. But the only real “deity” being worshiped - in a ending this is laboured - here is Cruise/Hunt. By the final act, the lines between Tom Cruise, the saviour of cinema, and Ethan Hunt, the incorruptible saviour of the world, have been awkwardly blurred.

So yes, Mission: Impossible proved its title wrong. Again. But for the first time, I left the theatre feeling a little weary. At nearly three hours, The Final Reckoning is the longest film in the franchise, so some of that fatigue is literal. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was more from weight of relentless spectacle. Indeed, I might have been the creeping realisation that the formula, while still functioning, is finally running out of steam.

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