For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the “Mission: Impossible” series. It’s been fun, on and off, but it’s no wonder he looks so beaten up on the poster for the latest edition, “The Final Reckoning.” Cruise — who turns 63 this year — long seemed impervious to ordinary time, with a boyishness that lasted well into middle age. His early stardom had already granted him a kind of immortality. Yet as the lines on his face discreetly deepened, and he kept pushing himself to lunatic extremes in this series, it seemed as if he were challenging physical death itself.
Cruise is at it again in “The Final Reckoning” — the enjoyably unhinged follow-up to “Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023) — plunging into deep waters, hanging off an airborne plane and insistently defying the odds as well as his own mortality. It’s unclear why the title changed between the two parts. It might have been a marketing decision; dead is a bummer, of course, and the word implied that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, an American operative extraordinaire, was heading toward the sort of bleak sign-off that capped Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. Whatever the case, the change suits Cruise’s Ethan, whose abilities have grown so progressively super since the series began in 1996 they seem quasi-mystical.
“Dead Reckoning” ended with Ethan and his team trying to stop an artificial intelligence called the Entity that’s set on destroying Earth. (Why? Why not?) The A.I.’s plan is the ultimate power grab, although it also seems like overkill, given that humanity is already hurtling toward self-destruction. But the Entity’s exceedingly possible mission keeps everyone busy, including Ethan’s right-hand whizzes, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), along with his love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell), and the giddily anarchic one-woman wrecking machine Paris (Pom Klementieff). Mostly, though, the Entity’s annihilating designs mean that Ethan has to step up his game from superhero to global redeemer.
So, once more, Ethan et. al. go unto the breach as they try to stop the Entity, which has thrown the world into chaos, inspired a doomsday cult and is trying to seize the world’s nukes — the usual. One of the dividends of the better big-studio productions is that they tend to be crowded with talented performers who can keep a straight face when delivering nonsense and sometimes bring feeling to the proceedings. So, as the clock runs down, characters enter and exit, including Angela Bassett’s tight-jawed American president and an army of appealing supporting players: Tramell Tillman, Janet McTeer, Shea Whigham, Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman and Hannah Waddingham.