Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Christopher McQuarrie: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (US/GB 2025) with Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. Poster: Paramount Pictures. Do click to enlarge the image.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning / Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

    US/GB © 2025 Paramount Pictures. Production companies: Paramount Pictures, Skydance, TC Productions. Produced by Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie.

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Written by Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen

Based on Mission: Impossible (tv series, 7 seasons, 1966–1973), by Bruce Geller

Cinematography: Fraser Taggart – colour – 2.39:1 – camera formats: 35 mm, AXS-R7, Codex and ZRAW – source formats: IMAX, Panavision, X-OCN XT and ZRAW – release formats: IMAX and 4K DCP

Music by Max Aruj, Alfie Godfrey. "Theme from Mission Impossible": Lalo Schifrin

Edited by Eddie Hamilton

    Starring

Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt)

Hayley Atwell (Grace)

Ving Rhames (Luther Stickell)

Simon Pegg (Benji Dunn)

Henry Czerny (Kittridge)

Angela Bassett (President of the United States Erika Sloane)

Esai Morales (Gabriel)

    170 minutes

    Distributed by Paramount Pictures

    Release dates

May 5, 2025 (Tokyo)

Festival premiere: 14 May 2025 Cannes

London premiere: 15 May 2025

May 23, 2025 (United States)

Finnish premiere: 21 May 2025 – released by Finnkino – Finnish / Swedish subtitles: Marko Hartama / Janne Staffans

Viewed at Tennispalatsi 1 (Isense), Helsinki, 7 June 2025

Manon Durand (Festival de Cannes, 2025): "Three years after taking the red carpet by storm with Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise is back in Cannes for the screening of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning by Christopher McQuarrie, presented Out of Competition. This is the eighth, and potentially final film, for the Paramount Pictures action franchise, which comes almost thirty years after the first installment, directed by Brian De Palma in 1996."

"After awarding him an honorary Palme d’or in 2022, the Festival de Cannes is delighted to welcome back Tom Cruise on Wednesday May 14, for the world premiere of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. This will be the third appearance of the American actor and producer on the Croisette, after Far and Away in 1992 and Top Gun: Maverick in 2022."

"Also, Christopher McQuarrie, who collaborated with the actor and director on the last four Mission: Impossible films, is back for Rendez-vous with…, giving festival-goers the opportunity to get some insight into the career of someone who has made thrillers his trademark and action cinema the work of a master craftsman."

"Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is the sequel to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, which was released in 2023. In the film, Tom Cruise, who plays Ethan Hunt, the franchise’s iconic character, must fight a new, and particularly formidable, enemy: an AI called “The Entity”. This latest installment may stir up certain emotions for the audience. In fact, the title (“The Final Reckoning”), as well as the trailer, which recounts a series of flashbacks and memories from previous installments, suggest that it could signal Hunt’s final mission. The eight films of the spy saga have been marked by spectacular stunts performed by Tom Cruise, the game of masks, intrigue set in the heart of major capital cities around the world and much more. Its sobering synopsis is summed up as follows: “Our lives are the sum of our choices.”" Manon Durand (Festival de Cannes, 2025)

AA: Upon the release of Top Gun: Maverick (US 2022) it was stated that Tom Cruise is the last film star in the sense of being able to break a film everywhere.

What an amazing and sobering observation. During the pandemic, in the golden age of streaming, Cruise's commitment to the cinema experience was remarkable.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is another grandiose Tom Cruise vehicle meant for the largest screens. The mission: save mankind from nuclear armageddon caused by an evil AI called The Entity. Ethan Hawk (Cruise) has four days to install a malware called Poison Pill to the Podkova module to prevent this. Problem: the Podkova is located in a lost sunken Soviet submarine called Sevastopol.

During its 170 minutes the film never gets boring. Neither is it frenetic, and this is an accomplishment of the director Christopher McQuarrie.

Like Maverick – and like James Bond in Skyfall and No Time to Die – Ethan Hunt is a man of the past. The world they knew is no more. Internet, virtual reality and cyberspace have taken over.

Reality itself is at stake, and this was one of the insights present already in Bruce Geller's original Mission: Impossible television series (1966–1973) with its analogue conceits of alternative realities and mind games.

The doomsday AI The Entity cannot be annihilated merely by sitting at a computer desk. Tom Cruise needs to dive to a continental shelf in the Bering Sea and fight the Entity's assassin Gabriel in mid-air, jumping from one biplane to another. Cruise has been registered into the Guinness World Records for doing his stunts himself.

Mission: Impossible is a continuation to cinema's action spectacle serials, launched by the Éclair company in 1908, who immediately also launched the practice of serial numbers (Nick Carter, le roi des détectives – Épisode 1: Guêt-apens, 1908).

Tom Cruise is also a successor to the cinema's greatest action and comedy heroes who did their stunts themselves, such as Harry Houdini, Harry Piel, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Poetry in motion.

The chase, the race against time and the last minute rescue also belong to the primordial tools of the action thriller. Never has the survival of mankind been so within a hair's breadth as in The Final Reckoning.

In Top Gun: Maverick I liked the emphasis on team spirit for instance in the beach ball scene. You must build team instinct. Still, Tom Cruise action vehicles are basically "one man" stories, in this case, "one man saves the world".

I occasionally followed the Mission: Impossible television series at the time of its original run in Finland and was impressed by the intelligence in the seamless team work. Memory may fail but the characters played by Peter Graves, Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, Lesley Ann Warren, Leonard Nimoy seemed all prominent and individual in action scenes. This is why I found the first theatrical Mission: Impossible movie disappointingly conventional in its regression to the "one man" approach. The team was there, but more in the background. I have not followed the series until now.

So it's a Tom Cruise vehicle, and long may he live. He is a unusual and unique superstar. He has conducted his career with wisdom, honing his craft with directors as versatile as possible: Coppola, Scorsese, Levinson, Stone, Reiner, Jordan, Crowe, Kubrick, Anderson, Spielberg, Mann, Redford... I am listening to the podcast Martha Argerich, une pianiste libre, in which the master musician tells that her teacher Friedrich Gulda advised her to change the teacher after two years, "because I don't want you to start to sound like me". Cruise has strengthened and enriched his craft with many of the best directors.

What remains? Montages of the end of the world. Passages of mourning and melancholia. The triumph of the spirit in situations of excruciating pain and danger. An assassination attempt of a Black female President of the United States. Acknowledging the core values of kindness, trust and mutual understanding. In the finale, long dialogueless passages full of intensity and meaning.

The final impossible mission is the survival of the planet.

...

Mission: Impossible (1996) Brian De Palma

Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) John Woo

Mission: Impossible III (2006) J. J. Abrams

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) Brad Bird

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) Christopher McQuarrie

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) Christopher McQuarrie

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023) Christopher McQuarrie

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) Christopher McQuarrie