Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review - can this really be the end for Ethan Hunt?

Whether it is or isn’t the final Mission: Impossible film, there’s a distinct fin-de-siècle feel about this eighth instalment, and not only because of its title. An early scene brings a nostalgic recap of highlights from the series’ history (which stretches back to 1996), with a voice-over from Angela Bassett’s President Sloane (pictured below) pleading with Ethan Hunt to return to save the world one more time.

Comeback roles for M:I veterans Henry Czerny (as Kittridge) and Rolf Saxon – reprising his role of William Donloe from the first M:I film – reinforce the sense of a circle being closed.

In the three decades of the franchise, it seems that Tom Cruise’s Hunt has evolved from being merely a preposterously-gifted undercover operative – “a master of infiltration, deception, sabotage and psych warfare” as somebody put it – into a messianic figure of almost biblical proportions, a notion reinforced three hours later at the end of the film in a sombre eulogy from his faithful acolyte Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames). In between, the action has rocked and rolled hectically around the planet, as Hunt’s Impossible Missions squad battle to thwart the sinister advance of the malign, all-devouring AI monster known as “The Entity” (continuing its dirty work from 2023’s Dead Reckoning – Part One).

The Entity is hell-bent on armageddon, and is steadily taking control of all the nuclear weapons on earth. The problem with this Entity thing, though, is that it’s just an abstract concept that exerts zero emotional pull on the viewer, and describing it as a “truth-eating digital parasite” doesn’t really help. Thus we have the return of additional villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) to give evil a human face as he tries to co-opt the Entity for his own deplorable purposes, but although he’s dastardly and despicable, he’s somehow not quite evil enough.

Previous M:I movies have tickled our pleasure-centres with their mixture of sensational action scenes and the wisecracking matiness of Hunt and his team, but the team seem a little short on joie-de-vivre this time around. Simon Pegg’s tech-nerd Benji Dunn is still faithfully at the boss’s side, though both he and Luther seem world-weary and lacking their usual facetious sparkle. The new-look, super-styled Hayley Atwell returns as Grace, but Rebecca Ferguson’s charismatic Ilsa Faust is no longer aboard, and nor is Vanessa Kirby’s titillating White Widow, despite being previously scheduled to appear. The heady elixir of pace, tension and humour that sparked up Dead Reckoning has gone off the boil this time around.

All of which makes the 62-year-old Cruise seem even more remarkable, as he continues to radiate the manic energy he has always brought to this role and delivers another performance that keeps the voltage cranked up to the max. There isn’t anything as extraordinary as the riding-a-motorbike-over-a-cliff or train-falling-off-a-viaduct stunts he created in Dead Reckoning, but, again in partnership with writer/director Chris McQuarrie, there are a couple of set pieces fit to gain admission to the M:I hall of fame.

For instance, Ethan must dive down into freezing Arctic waters to find the wreck of a sunken Russian nuclear submarine, the Sevastopol, and recover a gizmo called the Podkova, a vital tool for his Entity-thwarting mission. It’s an eerie, spectral sequence oozing menace, in which gung-ho Cruise did all the underwater stuff himself. Apparently he managed to hold his breath for six minutes at a time, which seems barely credible.

For a finale, Cruise brings us a kind of analog version of Top Gun, swapping screaming fighter jets for a pair of duelling biplanes, which swirl and tumble over the epic scenery of South Africa’s Blyde River Canyon. But what, if anything, will he think of next? And can we really expect Ethan to choose to accept saving the world yet again?

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