Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning delivers stunning action but stumbles with a cluttered plot, flat villains, and baggage from Dead Reckoning Part One.

Despite the best efforts of Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie to offer a first conclusion to the saga with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, it wasn’t enough in the face of the media and viral weight of the two biggest films of 2023 with Barbenheimer. Taking in over half a billion dollars, it wasn’t enough for a global film with a budget approaching $300 million for its seventh and eighth films . Two years later, after a name change and a marketing strategy that wiped out Part One, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning hopes to do well by once again offering breathtaking action sequences, but is still dragging the ball and chain of the first film.

Feeling that their narrative was already a little too tangled, or in order to ensure that people who hadn’t seen the previous opus hung up the wagon, the first act retraces in detail the events of the first film and its stakes, the race against time after an AI called the Entity. Here, the race takes on a whole new dimension, as the Entity is about to get its hands on every country’s nuclear arsenal and launch a global attack. If the first act of The Final Reckoning seems tedious, it’s mainly due to the numerous micro-flashbacks of multiple characters reminding us of their fate in the previous film, slowing down an already fuzzy narrative and finding itself rather pointless for a film released less than two years ago.

At the center of this race to get his hands on the Entity is always Gabriel (Esai Morales), always one step ahead of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his plans but always one step behind in having an interesting backstory, other than the desire to use the Entity to control the world. Meanwhile, in Washington, the President (Angela Bassett) and her ministers wonder whether Hunt is a criminal or a solution in a chaotic situation that will require the cabinet to potentially make a difficult choice if a nuclear attack is to be considered.

In the midst of all this, Hunt, with the help of a team bolstered by the arrival of Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), sets out on the trail of the source code left at the bottom of the sea in the Sebastopol submarine, the only means of dealing with this AI. It’s from this second act onwards that The Final Reckoning rises above mere exposition, and McQuarrie/Cruise deliver the spectacle so eagerly awaited in the Mission Impossible genre. Hunt’s exploration and escape from the Sebastopol is clearly one of the film’s major sequences, with incredible set design and cinematography, each contributing to the other. This creates an oppressive, spectacular atmosphere in which Hunt must find his way out by any means necessary, just as the franchise knows how to do.

The same could be said of the plane sequence in South Africa in the third act, which is particularly well constructed, with fluid editing and a much-appreciated restraint in the soundtrack, supporting Cruise’s dizzying stunts with the sound of the biplane in the air. This sequence is all the more welcome as it contrasts the action sequences of previous films, often technology-driven, with a return to something tangible, raw and visual, and just as powerful on screen.

And all this is surely what’s most damaging about The Final Reckoning, prodigious action sequences at the service of a chaotic script leaving no room for the newcomers, Paris and Degas to be developed beyond pointless oneliners meant to raise the tension and stakes in scenes. A story already packed with actors and points of view and which, in its extreme generosity, even introduces a Russian threat midway through, also in pursuit of the source code, before gradually abandoning it altogether to focus on Gabriel.

You can clearly sense that Cruise wanted to make this film the end of a whole, the culmination of a franchise and a character/actor who has risked everything to give audiences the best cinematic entertainment, even if it means pushing the parallel between Cruise and Hunt as savior of the cinema/world to its limit. But appointing an AI as the main villain means both that he’s everywhere, but also that he’s nowhere, that we have no face on which to identify a threat. In the end, the entity becomes just another mysterious object to be locked away. And Gabriel lacks enough personality to represent a striking enemy. It’s clear from the editing, writing and flashback choices that The Final Reckoning bears the scars of the previous film’s box-office failure, and is desperate to bring back the audience that wasn’t there in 2023. And it may have over-complexified itself to its own detriment in the process.