Critic Reviews

Even by the series’ own now well-established standards, this widely presumed last entry in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise is an awe-inspiringly bananas piece of work.

It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.

Final Reckoning offers some of the franchise’s tensest moments, to the point where you feel exhausted (mostly in a good way) after nearly three hard-charging hours.

Running in the footsteps of the last two entries directed by Christopher McQuarrie, “Fallout” and “Dead Reckoning,” No. 8 is another high-voltage, gargantuanly envisioned test of Cruise’s bodily limits. Only this franchise can make wincing fun.

While it trades sprawling vistas for tighter set pieces, it brings Ethan Hunt’s story full circle in a way that’s surprisingly emotional and—dare I say it—earned.

While fans of the Mission: Impossible franchise might shed a tear watching this emotional tribute, all audiences will be swept away by its action.

A tense, knotty opening act yields to some of Tom Cruise’s most impressive stunts yet, ending the film — and perhaps the series — on a high.

The Final Reckoning is stuffed, convoluted, and ludicrous at times. But it’s also mostly a great send-off to this universe, a deserved celebration for everything this series has accomplished, and one final (again, seemingly) showcase for Cruise as one of the greatest action stars of all time.

The Final Reckoning, final or not, presents us with a fascinating contradiction: Ethan Hunt is both a pure singular and a state of mind. He’s cinema as the madman dreamer’s paradise.

In The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise is out to save movies as much as Ethan Hunt is out to save the world.