Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

The Ghost and the Machine

Tom Cruise spends most of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning trying to outpunch an algorithm. As a piece of cultural symbolism, that is almost comically direct. We are watching a 62-year-old actor—still treated as the last true movie star, still carrying the glow of the man who supposedly kept analog blockbuster cinema alive with Top Gun: Maverick—slam his very mortal body into an omnipotent artificial intelligence called The Entity. (The fact that a Hollywood studio is spending this much money to warn us about runaway tech is its own little joke.) What grows out of that setup is uneven, intriguing, and, by the end, exhilarating. Cruise is not just playing Ethan Hunt now. He is playing a worldview.



The catch is that Christopher McQuarrie makes you sit through a very rough first hour to get there. I won't pretend otherwise: the opening stretch is a slog. The script buckles under the weight of franchise housekeeping, forever stuffing people into dim rooms so they can solemnly explain plot points we either remember already or never needed spelled out in the first place. I kept shifting in my seat, half-convinced the loose, improvisational energy that powered the previous entries had finally run dry. At times it plays less like a propulsive spy movie than a committee review of Ethan Hunt's entire career.