Spoilers for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning ahead!Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is (if the marketing is to be believed) the end of Tom Cruise's run as IMF agent Ethan Hunt. Watching the movie, it often feels like it. This franchise has always kept a very loose continuity, introducing or revising backstory in the opening minutes of each film to suit the latest story, and that's kept these nimble action movies from being weighed down. This film, by contrast, spends a remarkable amount of time looking backward at how far Ethan has come.

It's a curious choice, and a potentially detrimental one. Though it's still well-received, The Final Reckoning has more critical detractors than any installment in the Christopher McQuarrie era, in large part because the first third or so is heavy on expository dialogue. I've even seen words thrown around that I never would've associated with these movies, like "bloated" and "drags." I found it hard to imagine how a Mission: Impossible could 'drag' until I saw this one for myself.

I have some of the same reservations, but I also think Cruise and McQuarrie did something fascinating with their big franchise capstone. Together with this film's ex-part one, Dead Reckoning, they decided to make a Mission movie about Mission movies – how they're made, why they work, and what it means to make them in the age of Hollywood's IP obsession. Watch The Final Reckoning through this lens, and every bit of repetition starts to fall into place.

Final Reckoning Continues What Dead Reckoning Started

Or, Rather, Does It All Again

Because I had just done my franchise rewatch before seeing Dead Reckoning the first time, I noticed something strange: I had seen almost all of it before. There are references to every previous Mission: Impossible movie absolutely everywhere, from returning characters and locations to very specific character dynamics. Break down Gabriel, and you'll find he resembles each of Ethan's previous villains, as I wrote back in 2023:

Then there is Gabriel, Mission's Frankenstein's monster - constructed of pieces from every villain that came before him. Like Jim Phelps/Job (Mission: Impossible), he is a former mentor of Ethan's using a religious reference for an alias. Gabriel is positioned as an almost mythical archrival to Hunt, like Sean Ambrose (Mission: Impossible 2), and he takes a page from Owen Davian's (Mission: Impossible 3) playbook by making things personal and intentionally targeting people Ethan cares about. He combines the apocalyptic fanaticism of Kurt Hendricks/Cobalt (Ghost Protocol) with the deadly skill of Solomon Lane (Rogue Nation), but like August Walker/John Lark (Fallout), his ruthlessness is in service of another evil mastermind's plan.

This pervasive repetition was, I realized, all about the Entity. Ethan's true antagonist was essentially an algorithm trained on previous Mission movies, and it kept throwing his old storylines back at him. Gabriel taunted Ethan by telling him he was predictable, and that his behavior made certain things inevitable. But if there's one guaranteed outcome of these films, it's that Tom Cruise always wins in the end. That's what really made Ethan the one person on Earth the Entity truly feared.

I assumed The Final Reckoning would trust all the legwork done in that previous movie, but instead, Cruise and McQuarrie decide to do it all again. Those first few minutes are callback after callback after callback.

This, the movie suggests, is the existential threat facing Hollywood, and it seeks to make itself seem inevitable. It's the Entity's future, or none at all.

Just trace Ethan's journey. He breaks Paris out of prison (Ghost Protocol). He attends an ambassador's party (Mission: Impossible), where he flirts with a professional thief (M:I 2). He ends up chained in a basement (Rogue Nation) and threatened with the torture of a loved one (M:I 3). He chases Gabriel through an area beneath London that echoes his pursuit of John Lark in Fallout, and when Luther is forced to defuse a nuclear bomb (Fallout again), Ethan fails to save his dear friend (Dead Reckoning).

Unlike last time, The Final Reckoning makes these connections much more overtly, and in much quicker succession. McQuarrie even intercuts footage from previous films whenever one is referenced directly, and the script creates many opportunities to do so. We're meant to dwell on this repetition of the past, not just notice it.

The Final Reckoning Is About Franchise Filmmaking In 2025

And Why Tom Cruise's Way Of Doing Things Matters

Other Mission: Impossible movies might lend themselves to meta-readings, but not quite like The Final Reckoning does. This movie is truly about making movies – or, more specifically, franchise movies.

Think of the Entity as algorithmic filmmaking, specifically at the blockbuster level. It can only predict using what has come before, and it makes demands on story: One of these two characters must die now, "it is written" (we'll come back to that). In Dead Reckoning, everyone but Ethan wanting to harness its power was a comment on where Hollywood was heading. It implied, through Cruise's resistance, that Mission: Impossible stood apart from its competitors.

In The Final Reckoning, the Entity has run amok. Truth has been eroded. Nuclear arsenals are falling to its attacks one by one. Forget controlling it – there are people who want to follow it now. The idea that anyone would even believe they can still make use of it now looks to us like madness. This, the movie suggests, is the existential threat facing Hollywood, and it seeks to make itself seem inevitable. It's the Entity's future, or none at all.

Against this future stands Ethan and his rag-tag IMF team. The opening keyphrase from Dead Reckoning is refashioned into a mantra of sorts: "We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close and for those we never meet." These actors live and die in the shadows of movie theaters, and they do it for us, the unmet audience. I don't think it's a coincidence that this last section is repeated more than the rest. Gabriel, this movie's anti-Ethan, even throws it in his face, as if ticketbuyers merit only contempt.

And so Cruise, the man who much of the world expects to die filming one of his big stunts, becomes the only sane voice in the room. Having read the reports of The Final Reckoning's filming and inflated budget, I couldn't help but notice the resemblance when Ethan was convincing a room full of irate officials wanting to shut him down that they instead needed to give him carte blanche and an aircraft carrier.

And that's the bizarre magic of The Final Reckoning, which dares to try to have its cake and eat it too. The movie becomes what it wishes to fight against, at first, to prove its point. Wouldn't you rather have your franchise movies be the last hour, with all its Cruise/McQuarrie innovative showmanship, than the algorithmic retreading of the first hour?

Is Mission: Impossible Part Of The Problem, Or The Solution?

This Question Defines The Final Reckoning

Dead Reckoning pushes the narrative that Ethan, in his complete disregard for orders, is culpable for the collateral damage created by his decisions. The Final Reckoning takes this idea a step further, and uses the movie's most surprising franchise callbacks to do it.

The Rabbit's Foot, the MacGuffin of Mission: Impossible 3, is a mystery no longer. To torment Ethan, Gabriel reveals that the "Anti-God" he stole was actually the Entity's original program, and that putting it in the hands of the US government is what set the current state of events in motion. Therefore, Ethan is to blame for the Entity.

In our franchise movie reading, this is a striking change. The original Mission: Impossible, way back in 1996, was Tom Cruise's first movie ever as a producer. He has leaned heavily into the world of franchise blockbusters and allowed Paramount to continue to chase Mission's success for 30 years. Does he feel a sense of responsibility for what the industry has become? Did he, despite his intentions, help create the IP monster?

Through Ethan's relentless attempts to save the world, Cruise's pursuit of the biggest of big-screen entertainment is framed as noble.

To explore this further, Final Reckoning goes back to that first movie in two key ways. The first sees Briggs, Ethan's US government pursuer from Dead Reckoning, revealed as Jim Phelps, Jr., son of the traitorous agent that Ethan kills in Mission: Impossible's climax. This man is a living consequence of Hunt's actions, however justified, and Cruise plays the weight of his guilt in their scene together.

The second brings back William Donloe, the CIA agent who suffered the consequences of Ethan's suspended break-in at Langley – arguably still the defining moment of the Mission franchise. After the theft of the NOC List, Donloe was banished to an island station in the Bering Sea, where he has remained for the last three decades. From a certain perspective, Ethan's rogue actions ruined his life.

But when the two meet face-to-face in The Final Reckoning's third act, Donloe has the chance to correct this narrative. Without being exiled from Langley, he never would've been truly happy at work; he never would've met his wife. If Ethan is responsible for what happened to him, then he deserves credit, not blame.

This is, ultimately, what the film concludes, via Luther's message from the grave. Through Ethan's relentless attempts to save the world, Cruise's pursuit of the biggest of big-screen entertainment is framed as noble. He cannot control the consequences of his art, which can be good or bad, but "all that is good inside us is measured by the good that we do for others." Choosing to accept this mission, and to accomplish it his way, remains the right thing to do.

In a direct refutation of the Entity, Luther declares that "nothing is written" – a clever nod to the way these movies are shot without a set script. McQuarrie explained this approach to GQ in a way I find especially clarifying:

“We are not making it up as we go along. But we are constantly pushing ourselves to make it better, to make it more immersive, more resonant, more engaging. We don’t trust that just because somebody says these lines on a piece of paper that you’re going to feel those things.”

This is what The Final Reckoning is really about. Because of how it explores this idea, it may not be the best Mission: Impossible movie. But it does capture what makes them so special.