Some thoughts on “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” which screened at Cannes. The embargo has been lifted, and the film has a respectable 71 on Metacritic and 86% on Rotten Tomatoes.
I was disappointed by this one—not because it’s a bad film, but because it’s a tangled, overcomplicated experience that forgets what made this series special in the first place. The ‘Mission: Impossible’ films have never been about the plot, really. They’ve always functioned best when the story took a respectful back seat to the sheer, pulse-quickening spectacle of Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt doing the impossible—clinging to the side of planes, leaping between rooftops, outrunning death with the determination of a man who simply refuses to let gravity win.
Here, that clarity is lost. The film ties itself into so many knots that it forgets to breathe, let alone thrill. The joy of watching Cruise commit to daredevil insanity is still present, but buried beneath layers of flashbacks, double-crosses, and jargon-heavy exposition that feels designed more to impress than to engage. It’s not that the film doesn’t try—it tries almost too hard. But when everything is cranked to eleven, even the most impressive moments struggle to rise above the noise.
The ‘Mission: Impossible’ series has always thrived on the illusion of danger—that real people, with real bodies, were actually doing these things. In the best of them— ‘Ghost Protocol,’ ‘Rogue Nation,’ even the bravura ‘Fallout’—you could feel the tension in every climb, every chase, every dive off a cliff.
The best instalments were lovingly assembled by human hands, orchestrated with an almost romantic devotion to practical effects and coherent set-pieces. So it is a deep disappointment—almost an existential one—to report that ‘Final Reckoning’ feels like it was made by the very artificial intelligence it warns us about.
The first 90 minutes is a slog of flashbacks, exposition, and plot mechanics so convoluted they seem to fold in on themselves like a Möbius strip designed by an exhausted screenwriter. The film does eventually offer a dazzling underwater sequence—but it arrives too late, and leans too hard on the cold embrace of CGI.
There’s a manic energy to the whole enterprise, but it’s not the exhilarating kind—it’s the twitchy, over-caffeinated pulse of a film that can’t stop explaining itself. The plot is so eager to outsmart you, it ends up outsmarting itself, triple-backing into absurdity.
Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie may still be in the driver’s seat, but the vehicle feels hijacked—by algorithms, by legacy pressure, by the hollow demands of franchise cinema.
Cory Finley, a talented filmmaker, has directed three films so far: "Thoroughbreds" (2017), "Bad Education” (2020), and "Landscape with Invisible Hand.”