The ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise’s Reckoning
Originally published in Counter Arts on May 27, 2025.
Starting with 2011’s Ghost Protocol, the Mission: Impossible films found a schtick in doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on the tension of elongated, elaborate, and escalating action set-pieces. The five films since and including that one form a bell curve that almost perfectly illustrates the franchise’s journey to balance tone (left of curve) and plot (right) around said schtick. Ghost Protocol, whose central setpiece is largely responsible for Tom Cruise’s renaissance-fueling change in action movie sensibilities (which have proven to be genius-level intuitive; he’s the highest-grossing non-MCU actor in history and his previous three films tallied nearly $2.9 billion in worldwide box office), is exhilarating when it’s building toward its several climaxes and tonally inert when it’s not. 2015’s Rogue Nation and 2018’s Fallout, the series’ masterpieces, exist in the narrow equilibrium. And 2023’s Dead Reckoning and now The Final Reckoning, having mastered tone but fearing the gargantuan shadow of Fallout, tried to loop the franchise back to its origins in service to maximum tension and have consequently made an impossible tangle of plot.
Just as a magic trick requires a setup, the set-piece era M:I films require an astonishing amount of exposition — each additional line delivered is an additional notch of tension — and it’s remarkable how efficiently and entertainingly the series has pulled that off. But Dead Reckoning got very close to the holding line, and The Final Reckoning crosses it. It’s so convoluted that it employs several scene-stitch sequences of various faces from its bloated and conspicuously recognizable ensemble dramatically aggregating the plan to the audience — like those terrible pharmaceutical commercials where members from different demographics say a few words of a collective sentence.
Rogue Nation wouldn’t hit as hard as it does if it didn’t streamline its cast of primary characters and limit its story to two general plots (the IMF team’s and Ilsa’s), which naturally become interlinked; and Fallout, the best spy-action film ever made, in my opinion, and a legitimate GOAT contender in the at-large action genre, couldn’t have expanded in breadth and in scale and impact if not for Rogue Nation’s narrative precision, which Fallout is able to maintain because it directly continues Rogue Nation’s foundational threads. Dead Reckoning didn’t have the same luxury as Fallout did, and its new recipe included too many components. By nature of the bigger-than-last tension slope, The Final Reckoning’s only alternative to what it gives us was a regressive story, which was never going to happen. It’s not a coincidence that each entry since Rogue Nation’s relatively sleek 130-minute runtime has grown (The Final Reckoning is a gaping 170 minutes, ten short of three hours long, and feels longer).
There’s a sharp irony to the film’s title. The series created a monster, the series fed the monster, the monster got bigger and stronger, the series ran out of food, the monster ate the series — a golden goose come home to roost (it’s dumb but it’s funny and you didn’t think of it, did you?). The fault of The Final Reckoning isn’t in the script’s attempt to economize the information while reminding the audience how many parties are involved, it’s in allowing such an unruly plot that it necessitates such explanatory extremes (and casting actors of public esteem for new bit roles that consequently need face time). If you slammed a shot of liquor every time someone explained a gadget or recited instructions or said something like, “you mean to tell me you’re gonna do X”, or, “you’re crazy, that’ll never work,” or just glared at Ethan or Benji or Grace or Madame President (!) Sloane, you’d be dead by the hour mark.
Which brings me to the counterpoint. Had you died by the hour mark, you’d have just missed the film’s apex, a roughly-20-minute (guessing purely on recall from the theater screening) intra-submarine heist that may be the best sequence in the franchise. I won’t spoil a single detail, and it’d be disrespectful to summarize in a sentence a setup the film takes an hour to construct (although I could do it). It’s a tier of tension that justifies the pains of the buildup (the “previously on” franchise recap, the dumb slack-jawed looks, the sing-song synopses, the particularly inconvenient subplot in which Dead Reckoning’s Briggs and series veteran Kittridge prolong the festivities — and the runtime — with surprise interventions), the comedown (withdrawal), the reset (here we go again), and the afterword (the “wrap-up” consists of a corny, tape-recorded, 5-minute-long voiceover monologue, followed by a scene in which everyone gives each other many-too-many wordless looks). It’s the type of sequence Dead Reckoning lacked but needed a little less because despite its knot of strings, it had fewer strings in total. It’s the reason — the only reason — that despite my complaints I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this movie and I can say I won’t forget it.