Film Review: Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

Your mission — if you choose to accept it — is to enjoy the spectacular stunt pieces while ignoring the uncharacteristically bad dialogue in this final film of the series. 

30 years after the very first installment, Tom Cruise has put the finishing touches on his Mission Impossible franchise with The Final Reckoning. Clocking in at nearly 3 hours, it's stuffed to the brim with the usual spy-versus-spy hallmarks — double agents, military air, land and seacraft, death defying stunts, and, of course, Tom Cruise running at full speed across bridges and highways. But first, let's recap how we got here.

The plot

I asked a friend if I needed to go back and rewatch Dead Reckoning so I could be fresh with my plot lines, and she laughed and said no. It's true — these types of blockbuster films are popcorn movies in the same vein as Fast and Furious. I did anyway, of course, and honestly had forgotten where we last left Ethan and company back in 2023. So, real quick: Ethan and his team are once again (and as usual) at odds with the U.S. government, working solo to prevent a worldwide nuclear war. The primary antagonist is a malevolent AI called The Entity, who has a once-and-future-type relationship with the secondary bad guy, Gabriel, who is as bland as they come and honestly unrepresentative of the kind of evil-doers this franchise is known for (RIP Phillip Seymour Hoffman).

The Final Reckoning picks up with Ethan and his crew chasing after a series of robotic MacGuffins in absolutely wild locales, from the depths of the Bering Sea to the skies above the jungles of South Africa. Recapping the plot is ridiculously complicated, however, and the first hour of the film is mainly just exposition in various board rooms with U.S. government higher-ups, including a criminally underused Janet McTeer. The tasks are, as you'd expect, the most impossible of any task Ethan has been given, and the stakes, as per usual, are the end of the world. 

What works

Tom Cruise saved cinema back in 2022 with Top Gun: Maverick, and I firmly believe that there's no living actor more committed to the craft of moving making than he is. His love for this franchise in particular is clearly evident. Even though I have some gripes with this movie (which I get into below), it's a hell of a ride, and completely entertaining.

Seeing the crew all together — Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg — after 30 years is impressive and adorable, and it doesn't feel like they're acting when they're talking and reminiscing, there's that much chemistry. 

There are also some incredible casting choices that keep surprising you every few minutes. Hannah Waddingham plays an admiral in charge of an aircraft carrier, and that was definitely not on my 2025 bingo card. It was awesome. 

Tramell Tillman, better known as Mr. Millchick from Severence, shows up as a sub commander and absolutely steals every scene he's in, providing some much-needed comic relief.

A mustache-less Nick Offerman plays an army general who's all bluster and bluff, but ends up saving the day.

The best set piece in years

Under a constantly ticking clock  — of which there are literally many in the film — Ethan is given carte blanche with the U.S. Navy to head to the frozen wastes of the Bering Sea to retrieve the source code of the evil AI. The only catch? It's locked deep inside a sunken Russian sub called the Sevastopol, sitting 500 feet under the surface in frigid waters. 

As a scuba diver, I realized instantly how insane this mission is. 500 feet is at the limits of human diving ability — the average vacation diver gently coasts along beautiful reefs at 30 feet — and it appears Ethan has no experience or training in underwater technical diving. 

But have no fear! The badass divers of the friendly American sub give him a crash course, a dry suit (warmer than a wetsuit), and a final reminder to constantly breathe out during his ascent to the surface or else his lungs will explode. (This scene also had a fantastic appearance by Katy O'Brian, who you might remember from Love Lies Bleeding and The Mandalorian.)

After Ethan suits up, he's shot into the freezing cold, inky black water to take on the submarine. For the next 15 minutes, there's no dialogue, the tension is ratcheted up to 11, and you could hear a pin drop in my IMAX theater in between the shrieks of expanding metal and watery deluges.

It's hard to explain just how incredible this scene is — even looking on Google for images, you can't capture the claustrophobia or fear that permeates every shot. Even if you hate the rest of the movie (which some people might!), this set piece alone is worth the price of admission. 

After Ethan finally retrieves the source code, he attempts to escape out of a torpedo tube, but his life support equipment doesn't fit. In typical Ethan fashion — or maybe Tom Cruise fashion? It's getting harder and harder to tell them apart – he sheds his dry suit, his oxygen, and his mask, then on a single breath ascends to the surface. 

I think my jaw literally was open for 5 solid minutes.

Yes, this action should have killed him. Yes, he has hypothermia. Yes, he literally drowned. Yes, he has the bends. But fortunately the team is at the surface with a portable decompression chamber and a knowledge of CPR. Some folks will absolutely lose it at this point, calling it unrealistic. But that's the movie for you. Of course he wasn't going to die. 

Some fans will argue that the plane stunt in the final act overshadows the sub stunt, but I disagree. But the plane sequence is objectively incredible, as well — Ethan basically wing walks for 20 minutes on two different biplanes, managing to unseat both bad guys and take control of the aircraft by himself. 

What doesn't work

I think my primary gripe with The Final Reckoning is the bad guy(s). First, having a malevolent AI not only has been done, but The Entity in this film is incredibly impersonal. Skynet and the various terminators in the Terminator franchise had a constant boot-on-your-neck threatening feeling that actually was kind of scary. The Entity is mysterious, all-knowing, and playing fast and loose with the world's nuclear powers. I guess that objectively is scary, but it never hooked me in. Much like how creative works produced with AI lack no heart, a villain that's just AI similarly has no heart. Not even an evil one.

Speaking of nuclear threats, it's wild that it's the primary doomsday weapon in the film. It just seems out of place and very Cold War, and today's generation will never fully know just how scary that threat has been. 

Gabriel, the supposed link to Ethan's past life before the IMF, is somehow connected to The Entity, but it's never really explained, and he just doesn't give off evil vibes. He's probably my least favorite villain in years. Give me somebody to really hate!

Finally, the dialogue just really threw me off. It's over-the-top bad — and I have a very high cheese level when it comes to action movies. It's so bad it keeps you from emotionally investing in the outcome, and my viewing partner was scoffing or laughing at every other line.

The Final Reckoning somehow has the militaristic scope and shock-and-awe factor of a '90s Michael Bay movie, but without the actual emotion of a Michael Bay movie — and this is coming from someone who usually cries at Armageddon on every rewatch, so I mean this without irony or sarcasm. Yes, I realize how silly this sounds, too.

All of this to say, of course, that if you can get over the fact that there's not a compelling emotional heft to the film, you'll have a grand time with a bucket of popcorn and an icy beverage. I comforted myself by telling a friend, "If I want good dialogue, I'll go watch a Jim Jarmusch movie!" and then proceeded to fan girl about the stunts and action sequences. That's what makes a Mission Impossible movie, anyway — the scenes where Tom Cruise defies death and manages to blow our minds with what's possible to film.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

First Scare: Interview With the Vampire (1994)

A groundbreaking vampire film, tangled with misogyny and old-school monster melodrama

Vampire horror is not my favorite genre, so I generally avoid most of it. My most positive experiences with vampire fiction consist of an ill-advised beach vacation reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which I found surprisingly creepy and enjoyable); Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters book series (Magnus, Raphael, and Simon are all very different but likeable vampires); Twilight, which I found reasonably entertaining and, at least, not offensive; and the first season (British version) of Being Human, a slice-of-life story of a ghost, werewolf, and vampire trying to live a normal life in modern-day London. (I will also admit to watching Kate Beckinsale in Underworld more than once.) Beyond those diversions, I generally skip contemporary vampire content since a common premise is often alpha males hedonistically and cruelly murdering innocent people (usually women) to satiate an internal need. So, I unapologetically avoided the original 1994 Interview With the Vampire until this October’s First Scare project.

I remember the arrival of this film in theaters and the resulting rebirth of vampire trendiness. The stars of the film were the then super beautiful Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas (who I forgot was in this story). My college bestie loved the Anne Rice novels and, although I never read them, I understood the movie had several departures from the books. However, despite the traditional appeal of the sexy vampire trope, the film ultimately felt intensely misogynous—primarily violence by men against women, which is ironic since the source material is written by a woman. I know this film is a favorite for many, so I will just say… it’s not for me.

The story begins in the present (1994), with the eternally young vampire, Louis (Brad Pitt) telling the story of his life to a skeptical newspaper reporter (Christian Slater). Then we move to the flashback. Our protagonist Louis is a 1700s slave plantation owner in Louisiana. So, yes, any possible sympathy from me went out the window. His wife and baby have recently died so he’s depressed and making poor choices (nihilistically carousing, etc., because he wants to die due to his grief). Along comes Lestat (Tom Cruise), a blonde, French vampire hanging out in Louisiana. He offers Louis a variation of death: vampirism, to which Louis agrees. Again, no sympathy. After he becomes a vampire, Louis has some buyer’s remorse and is a bit disturbed at having to drink the blood of living creatures / humans (killing them) to live. Lestat has no such concerns and kills (mostly women) indiscriminately. Louis shows his moral outrage by initially mostly drinking rats’ blood, which Lestat eyerolls. However, Louis has no problems killing his Black female slave (Thandie Newton), especially after she says, “you haven’t come by the slave quarters lately.” Ugh. When Louis hands the dead woman back to the rest of his slaves, he laments that he’s a bad person. At this point I was definitely ready to stop watching. Then he randomly tells them to leave (they’re “free”). I mean, it’s the 1700s in the American South. They’re obviously not free. He can’t even be bothered to write an official document for them.

Later, during a plague epidemic in New Orleans, Louis finds a little girl (Kirsten Dunst), with her dead mother, and vampire-kills the child. Presumably, he thinks she has the plague too and is doomed anyway. Unclear. However, Lestat turns the child, Claudia, into a vampire so that she can be a companion for the always brooding / whining Louis. The three become a creepy family until little (one hundred year old) Claudia has had enough of Lestat’s controlling behavior and decides to put an end to him. Then the story shifts gears to true, epic violence.

I was surprised by how dated the actual, physical film looked and how dated the acting was. Lestat and later the European vampire king, Armand (Antonio Banderas), are so melodramatic as the alpha vampires that I struggled to take them seriously, despite the carnage. Louis is angsty, but simultaneously complicit in killing, in a way that becomes annoying. The second half of the film mostly consists of women being murdered while begging for their lives in some sort of sexualized context. Again, not for me.

Kirsten Dunst’s Claudia is the main bright spot in the story. She is wonderfully sharp-tongued, creepy, feral, and intense, and she is the only bit of girl-power in this story. Louis’s big revenge scene is somewhat satisfying, as is an earlier moment when Lestat goes monster-y feral after being set on fire. Other than that, this classic film is not one I’ll be watching on repeat. I can see why AMC thought a remake was needed. Apparently, I prefer my fictional vampires to be more grounded. I also, admittedly, prefer stories with at least one sympathetic protagonist. This film has none. In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, there is at least a team of heroes trying to stop the killing. In Shadowhunters, there are vampire heroes and vampire villains, and meaningful discussions of the label of “downworlders.” Those stories are all more to my taste. But I appreciate Interview With the Vampire for its role in reimagining the vampire genre, taking it from monstrously alien to familiarly human, with all its flaws and moral questioning. In doing so, it opened the doors to a range of new interpretations, including many that I quite enjoy.

Highlights

• Another film carried by the child actor
• Problematic misogyny
• A groundbreaking change of pace for the vampire genre

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Microreview [film]: Edge of Tomorrow

An edge-of-your-seat, laugh-out-loud, knock-your-socks-off scifomance! 

First things first: in real life, Tom Cruise may be mad as a haberdasher, but on screen he still has the magic. So even if you find Tom Cruise disagreeable as an individual (and let's face it, who doesn't?), I'd advise against letting your distaste for his craziness spoil a perfectly good movie!

Second things second: director Doug Liman has combined the humor of Swingers with the frenetic action of The Bourne Identity in this, his newest gem. Because of the relatively unusual (though by no means unique) temporal premise of Edge of Tomorrow (about which I will say as little as possible so as to keep unadulterated the joy of discovery for the six people in the world who haven't already heard it compared to Groundhog Day or Source Code), there were almost limitless options for how to depict the story: in a farcical mode, or a deadly serious action mode, or a Shakespearian tragedy, or a humance (humorous human interest romance). But Liman and the film's other creators have struck just the right balance, in my opinion, between the humantic and the sci fi action extravaganza modes.

As with any project of this scope, some aspects strike specific individuals (notably me) with greater pizzazz than others. Certain elements of the movie's plot, including the enemy's bizarre, almost incomprehensible inability to deal with what seems like the mother of all weaknesses/chinks in its armor, and the handful of cases of "we've managed to throw together a doohicky that can deux the crap out of your machina" sci fi babble, left me scratching my head. But then, if the enemy were truly as omnipotent as they seem, the movie would have been about twenty minutes long, so perhaps I should simply accept the pseudo-scientific exposition of gadgets and whatnot as the price one pays for good entertainment.

Everything going as planned...ish.

And what entertainment! In addition to the intriguing references to World War I (Blunt's character being nicknamed the Angel of Verdun, etc.) there are quite a few laugh out loud moments, and twists worthy of an M. Night Shyamalan movie (but without the crappiness!), even for those of us who (sigh) were told beforehand that Edge of Tomorrow is "just like Groundhog Day but with aliens and stuff" and thus instantly had the ultimate shock surprise of the movie spoiled. And the on-screen eye candy of Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, as well as the film's deliberate attempt (or so I see it) to prevent audiences from too easily identifying with Cruise's character (who starts and remains kind of unappealing personality-wise), are sure to please.

Even scifobics (up to and including old people!) who get the heebie-jeebies whenever movies contain anything that isn't 'realistic' should enjoy this high-octane romp! (Yes! I've always wanted to use that ridiculous phrase, which is only trotted out for Jason Statham movies under normal circumstances but seems appropriate here.)

So in conclusion, happy birthday, America—and what better way to celebrate than by seeing Edge of Tomorrow?

The Math:

Baseline assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for having plenty of humance and +1 for striking a nice balance between laughs and chills

Penalties: -1 for a few instances of sloppy sci fi babble along the lines of "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" (though nowhere near that bad)

Nerd coefficient: 9/10 "Standout in its category" (admittedly, it's kind of a small sub-category we're talking about here, but for what it's worth, I'd say this movie trumps the excellent Source Code and even rivals the King of Time Loop movies, Groundhog Day itself!)

See more about our scoring system here. 

Zhaoyun, zompire scifantomance fan, has been keeping it real here at Nerds of a Feather since before Edge of Tomorrow was a gleam in its director's eye (or in any case since early 2013).