Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton
Week of May 19, 2025
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Rated PG-13 for bloody images, action, brief language, and sequences of strong violence
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 79%
In Theaters
Finally, we are getting the finale of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise, which also happens to be the second part of this two-part mission. Continuing the tale from before, Ethan (Cruise) is on the hunt to find and destroy The Entity, an AI system that has gotten out of control and which threatens the entire planet. The key to finding The Entity lies with stopping Gabriel, the one man chosen to be the human intermediary as it tries to take over the world. Traveling from continent to continent, Ethan and his team play a dangerous game of chess with millions of lives at stake. I must hand it to Cruise – while I don’t really care for him or his crazy personal life, he is really good at making movies. And this one is truly epic, especially when you take the two movies as a whole. For the first hour, the film is surprisingly soft, with only a splash of action and a lot of exposition. But at almost three hours long, you can guess correctly that that will change, and it manages to put you on the edge of your seat, chewing your nails down to their nubs, for much of the second and third act. Especially impressive is that Cruise is still doing most of his own stunts, and the stunts look very much out of control and extremely dangerous. But if it were just action, it would suffer under its own weight, so thankfully there is a solid and relevant story behind it all, and while the pieces of the puzzle are technically all big MacGuffins, you are completely invested in their importance and their necessity. If the film has one fault, it’s that it spends way too much time, throughout, making sure the audience understands that this franchise is almost thirty years old, with multiple flashbacks and old characters, or references to old characters, popping in to say hi. I’m guessing that they are assuming that much of the audience might be new to the series and this might help advertise to go back and watch the earlier films. But cutting out ten to fifteen minutes would have served the story better in this particular case. A-