Although not the official tagline, full-time acrobat and part-time spy Ethan Hunt looking at the camera and asking us to “Trust me, one last time” became a popular refrain online, as if the future of movies depended on it. As it turns out, it wasn’t just a clever fourth wall-breaking hook for the (maybe) last “Mission: Impossible,” but the central plot of Tom Cruise’s victory lap as our favorite death-defying entertainer. Ethan spends most of the first half of “The Final Reckoning,” a nearly feature-length 75 minutes, moving through a defense budget’s worth of military spaces – helicopters, war rooms, aircraft carriers, submarines – while taking turns pleading to variously ranked military officials, including the President, to trust him unquestioningly.
Ethan asking for blind faith happens at least seven times, and while for some (myself included) it tests the bounds of repetitiveness, it also makes “The Final Reckoning” the most existential “Mission” yet, questioning everything that Ethan has come to represent. Past “Missions” have challenged Ethan and the IMF. Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s script goes further, surrounding Ethan with skeptics and doubters, adding pressure to prove, once more, the method to his madness. It’s a device redeployed from “Top Gun: Maverick,” putting scrutiny on the nature of who he is, what he stands for, and what his 29-year legacy has cost him. Even after the franchise’s eight film run, Ethan still feels like a relatable enigma, an action hero who is both the embodiment of movie star Tom Cruise as cinema’s most daring windwalker, and a spy defined by his psychotic gambles of daring and moral certitude more than his common humanity.
Fair-handed criticisms have been directed at the opening hour of “The Final Reckoning,” which ricochets between locations, characters, and time periods, all while intersplicing footage from the seven previous “Mission: Impossible” movies. Those flashbacks are clearly there to help acquaint newcomers. Still, they’re so interwoven into the film’s structure that they have a stranger effect, almost playing like an abstract visual essay on what makes Ethan Hunt tick. Using this full-motion video-like editing technique, Ethan’s past is brought into his future; this is most explicit when Gabriel reveals the “Rabbit’s Foot” is the Entity and Ethan is the one who set it loose. It’s a scene already modeled after “Mission: Impossible III,” where instead of Julia as the woman in peril, it’s Hayley Atwell’s Grace, spliced with footage from J. J. Abrams’ film alongside newly shot material designed to blend seamlessly. “The Final Reckoning” risks crossing the line between derivative and playing like a meta greatest hits collection, where key elements of past films, especially “Ghost Protocol” and “Fallout,” re-emerge. This turbulent narrative design, at once jumbled and purposeful, summarizes decades worth of Ethan’s greatest victories and failures, including those he’s saved alongside everyone he’s risked. All of his choices have led to this, Kittridge says – a point so intrinsic to “The Final Reckoning” it’s merged with the film language itself.
That mindset of reflection inevitably recalls the many ways one can read Ethan Hunt. Many indulge in the tabloid approach, where it’s temptingly easy to view the series as reflective of Cruise’s own life, or at least how he wants to be perceived. It’s easy to imagine that, back in 1996, Cruise wanted to be seen as a new generation of Hollywood leading man whose balletic poise and determination were inextricable from the man himself. Later, the 2000s kitsch mania of “Mission: Impossible 2“ turned Cruise into a glammed and global action star, while “Mission: Impossible III“ domesticated Ethan as a friendly family man defending his wife, timed right after Cruise got himself in hot water for a series of disastrous media appearances making him look “weird“ (you know the ones). “Ghost Protocol“ literally begins with Ethan in jail, needing to redeem his image, only for “Rogue Nation“ (post-Cruise’s divorce), following Ethan’s attempt to move on with Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust. Ethan looking “crazy,“ only to be proven of sound body and mind, becomes a recurring theme. You get the idea. Tom Cruise has undergone one of the most striking reversals in public sentiment in the last twenty years, and the trajectory of “Mission“ is one reason why.
Whether that’s conscious or not on Cruise’s part (the parallels are maybe too uncanny to be wholly coincidental, but my guess is they aren’t as intentional as some believe), what the films themselves suggest is far more interesting. Ethan isn’t so much a normal human being as a purely distilled pulp hero, a figure of action-propelling adjectives – righteously determined, obsessively focused, relentlessly moral – more than complicated psychology. Ethan may be tested, but he never truly changes; in none of these films does he have a real “character arc.“ Instead, Ethan is awesome; what he does is awesome, and he convinces those around him to go along with that awesomeness. Break into a Langley vault? Absolutely. Rappel down the side of the tallest building in the world? Of course. Clamber up the roped payload of a moving helicopter? Hell yes. He has a dry, self-aware wit about all this, delivering lines like “You want drama? Go to the opera“ during a mission at the Vienna Opera House – just enough humor to keep his superheroic feats feeling relatable. Unlike Jack Traven in “Speed“ or John McLane in “Die Hard,“ there is no end-of-movie catharsis or lessons to be learned. There is nothing left for Ethan Hunt to become still; he is already in a state of constant becoming.
It’s also possible to view the whole series as a surprisingly coherent eight-movie arc, emerging almost accidentally from how the franchise (at least until McQuarrie stayed on after “Rogue Nation“) was a murderer’s row of rotating filmmakers, each reinventing the series to their whim. Like the teams that comprise each film, they’re a crew of specialists, each possessing a special skill: Brian De Palma’s sensualized intrigue and masterful geography, John Woo’s fusion of East-West aesthetics, J. J. Abrams’ jocular team dynamics and relatable melodrama, Brad Bird’s bouncy aestheticism and humor, and McQ’s old school back-to-basics classicism. Even in the “McQ era,“ McQuarrie opted to reinvent himself movie to movie, darkening the mood in “Fallout“ before making “Dead Reckoning“ a zany techno-thriller and “The Final Reckoning“ an A.I. riff on Lumet’s Cold War thriller “Fail Safe.“
And so, too, Ethan must change with these filmmakers and stories. The team wipe-out in the opening of De Palma’s first “Mission“ is the big bang of Ethan’s obsession with preserving his crew at all costs, while “Mission: Impossible 2“ is his leather-jacketed, hair-swooping, sexed-up era before meeting Julia (Michelle Monaghan) and settling down in “Mission: Impossible III.“ The job gets in the way, only to find renewed kinship with Ilsa Faust, until she, like Ethan, gladly puts her life on the line for others, resulting in her death. Each filmmaker’s rebooted style is reflected in these shifts, which is why the moodier range of McQuarrie’s later movies is so apt. McQ’s Ethan is either a risk-obsessed, death-chasing lunatic (“Rogue Nation,“ where he tranquilizes the British Prime Minister) or our one and only messiah (the “Reckonings“), while “Fallout“ – the series’ zenith – combines both.
Yet, for a franchise most known for mask gags and gum gadgets and Tom Cruise risking his life for popcorn entertainment, what unites these different phases of Ethan’s career is his unwavering moral core. This is often in defiance of his IMF mandate, pointing to another unique feature of the “Mission: Impossible“ franchise – it’s curiously skeptical, if not outright oppositional, to notions of state power. Ethan not only never follows strict orders (leading to his constant disavowal), but his superiors almost always become as much his enemy as the evildoers he’s trying to stop. Look to Kittridge’s smug clownishness, framing Ethan’s family to put pressure on him, or “Mission: Impossible III’s” IMF Director Brassel (Lawrence Fishburn) as a condescending, red tape pencil-pusher, or “Rogue Nation’s” Hunley (Alec Baldwin) wastefully obsessed with proving Ethan’s malfeasance. These are unflattering portraits of the intelligence community, a dismal medley of opportunistic, unlikable, careerist, and amoral higher-ups. Consequently, most of “M: I’s”villains are former government employees, from Phelps to Lane to Walker, right down to the Entity, as if a government-created ChatGPT rebelled and seized power for itself, rewriting reality and notions of right and wrong along the way. The system is broken, so they try to leave or change it.
Most damning of all, Ethan’s trust in his own government is tellingly low. An often glossed-over detail in “Dead Reckoning“ is how Ethan’s primary goal isn’t simply stopping the Entity but preventing it from being seized by the U.S. Government, while in “The Final Reckoning,“ Ethan would rather risk nuclear armageddon than let the U.S. get control of it. He doesn’t believe any authority should have that kind of power, and it isn’t the first time – in “Mission: Impossible 2,“he breaks protocol by destroying the Chimera bioweapon even though the IMF ordered him to deliver it.
That’s probably why, from “Mission: Impossible 2“ forward, Ethan’s obstacles evolve from purely physical to the philosophical, threatening his absolutist convictions by forcing him to choose between saving someone – usually a love interest (Nyah, Julia, Ilsa), a teammate (Benji, Luther), or as in “Fallout,“ a female cop who was in the wrong place at the wrong time – and his duties to the IMF. McQuarrie took this theme and ran with it, with a four-film study that punishes Ethan for all the narrowly won dice rolls he’s taken over the franchise. In the “Reckonings,“ we track all the unintended consequences of Ethan’s short-term wins, which is why McQuarrie and Jendresen invoking the rabbit’s foot, bringing back a surprisingly cheerful Donloe (Rolf Saxon) and revealing Shea Whigham is the dejected son of Jim Phelps isn’t true fan service; it’s untangling the chained consequences of choice itself, the beginning prompt of this whole series. Ethan’s antics become lectures in ethics on the preciousness of life despite unpredictable outcomes, delivered by bathroom stall fist fights and halo jumps.
It follows that in “The Final Reckoning,“ just as Ethan spent his career confronting moral dilemmas, choosing between one life and many, now so must his country. As the Entity – the “lord of lies“ – seizes control of the world’s nuclear arms, Bassett’s President plans to initiate nuclear strikes on the world’s Entity-hacked nuclear arsenals to destroy them before they’re launched on American soil. In a strategy recalling “Fail Safe“ and the ferries in “The Dark Knight,“ she would nuke a U.S. city to create the impression of parity between nations – we would all suffer the same. The Entity persuading the President of the United States to potentially nuke multiple countries, as well as her own, is sneakily reminiscent of the opening of “Dead Reckoning,“ where it creates a digital phantom to trigger a Russian submarine to torpedo itself to the bottom of the ocean. The ability of the Entity to obfuscate clear moral choices makes it the ideal final villain of Ethan’s saga. Yet, seconds before she’s about to begin the attack, she stops, declaring, “I’m not living in the Entity’s reality.“ She might as well have said, “I’m living in Ethan Hunt’s,“ showing how his obsessive protection of human life has had a positive effect, the true sum of all his choices.
The joy of watching Ethan isn’t in the question of whether he’ll prevail, but by what crackerjack nearly-dying scheme he will save the day. Hunley called Hunt “The living manifestation of destiny,“ showing how he, as a character, cannot be divorced from the heightened play of the genre itself. It’s only through Ethan’s miraculous, movie-magicked propulsive determination, that essential awesomeness, that he’s always been able to conquer the day. Between charged runs across Shanghai rooftops and jumping a motorcycle off a cliff, he’s able to save the one life while saving millions while convincing those around him of the light. If this is his goodbye, he’s won it. It’s a dream that can only exist in the movies, which is why Ethan – a figure whose enigmatic appeal is both the purest distillation of Cruise’s persona and cinema’s most manic savior-spy – is able to make it real for us on the silver screen and earn our trust one last time.
Have you seen “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning?“ yet? What did you think of it? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account.
