Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the eighth film in the franchise and ostensibly its finale, looks, feels, and sounds like the sort of movie you need to see on the big screen. The powers that be at the Cannes Film Festival clearly thought so too: the picture premiered here on May 14. And even if, some 20 or even 10 years ago, adding a pop franchise entry like this one to the festival lineup might have seemed like a cheap, attention-grabbing stunt, it means something wholly different now. Aside from the fact that Cannes isn’t necessarily above the occasional cheap, attention-grabbing stunt, as an institution it is and always has been all about the big-screen experience, which is now so endangered that it needs all the attention it can get. In 2025, Final Reckoning is exactly the kind of splashy crowd-pleaser that the festival seeks out to both offset and complement its otherwise fairly serious-minded slate of films from all over the world. No one would begrudge Tom Cruise his turn on the Cannes red carpet, and at the Final Reckoning premiere, the crowd seemed happy to welcome him. You don’t have to love Cruise to acknowledge that he’s probably the most widely recognizable movie star in the world. Sometimes recognition counts as a kind of love.
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To his credit, Cruise believes with all his heart in the big-screen experience. Just as his Mission: Impossible character Ethan Hunt gamely takes on the burden, ad nauseam, of saving the world, Cruise genuinely thinks he can save cinema. His optimism is touching, if unrealistic. But as hard as he, and we, might wish it could be so, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning—directed by franchise veteran Christopher McQuarrie, who also cowrote the script—isn’t the kind of movie that will save movies. It’s big, extravagant, and at times very beautiful to look at. The story is the problem: packed with expository dialogue, it feels as if it were written to be digested in 10- or 15-minute bites. Characters robotically repeat significant McGuffiny phrases. The Rabbit’s Foot! The Anti-God! The Doomsday Vault! Final Reckoning doesn’t flow; it lurches forward in a series of information-delivery packets. If you’ve seen the first half of this double whammy, 2023’s conveniently titled Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, but forgotten what the hell it was all about, you needn’t worry. You could queue up Final Reckoning at home, go out to walk the dog, and get caught up in a snap when you return. And how cinematic is that?
The plot, picking up where Dead Reckoning Part One left off, goes something like this: Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is in hot water for—quelle surprise—failing to follow orders. (He got thrown off track by trying to avenge the death of his wife—we’re supposed to believe Ethan is a true romantic only because we’re reminded over and over again.) Now he must complete the mission with which he’s been entrusted: to vanquish the scary all-seeing, all-knowing AI being known as the Entity. To do so, he must dive deep into Arctic waters to procure a doodad known as the Podkova—a disappointing-looking little thing that looks like an eight-track cassette—which contains the Entity’s source code. Not so fast, though: the Podkova is nothing without a little plug-in known as the Poison Pill. Once Ethan has that, the Entity will be kaputsky.
Unfortunately, the Poison Pill is in the possession of wily villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), who’s fond of slinking around and bragging about how much power he’ll have once the Entity is in his grasp. He’s already got the Poison Pill, having seized it from one of Ethan’s dearest colleagues in the Impossible Mission Force, Ving Rhames’ Luther. Many of Ethan’s other helpers (the ones who haven’t been killed off—RIP Rebecca Ferguson’s magnificent Ilsa Faust) have returned, including tech-support smarty Benji (Simon Pegg), foe-turned-friend Paris (Pom Klementieff), and ace pickpocket Grace (Haley Atwell), who also slips handily into the role of Ethan’s love interest. Sadly, Grace doesn’t get to do much pickpocketing: her chief job is to gaze admiringly at her hero beau and issue solemn declarations like “The whole world’s in trouble, Ethan. You’re the only one I trust to save it.” At one point, Ethan nearly dies—it wouldn’t be a Mission: Impossible movie without at least one or two or three close calls—and in a sequence shot with the tender, dreamy vagueness of a feminine-hygiene commercial from the ‘70s, she brings him back to robust health with her womanly caresses. No one in the Cannes audience laughed; perhaps the end times really are nigh.
But no matter: cinema is still bigger than all of us, with the capacity to be many things. Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning is just one kind of thing, a big-screen entertainment that should be better than it is. It does offer some moments of joy: the climactic stunt sequence—involving not one but two biplanes, soaring over countryside greenery—is fun precisely because it’s a pleasure, finally, to gaze at something tangible and mechanical, instead of just contemplating the threat posed by the Entity. (Represented as a talking ganglion of light, it’s a disappointingly abstract villain.)
And no matter how you feel about Cruise, you’ve got to admit he looks pretty good. As usual, his Ethan Hunt is muscular, hardy, game for anything. If any of the cartilage in his joints is wearing away, you’d never know it. A sequence in which he’s told he must train in advance for a treacherous underwater mission has him zipping away on a treadmill in manly-man fashion, electrodes stuck to his bare, gleaming chest. He’s still got that boys-adventure-book grin, though he can also be suitably solemn when he remembers, as one character after another reminds him, that the fate of the world is in his hands. As Ethan Hunt, Cruise may just be going through the motions of being Tom Cruise. But would an audience want to see him any other way? When he appeared onscreen, the audience at the massive Cannes press screening I attended—not to be confused with the glitzy premiere—cheered just a little, as if embarrassed by their spontaneous enthusiasm. This was a crowd of critics and journalists from around the world. We’re supposed to be cool, circumspect, not-too-easy to please—but also, we love our stardust. The movies aren’t just one thing, and they can’t be saved by one man. Still, we’ll believe the world can be snatched from AI doom if Tom Cruise can just plug the Poison Pill into the Podkova. For now, it’s almost enough.