"Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning": review

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt: one... last... time...?

[WARNING: spoilers. And length. This is a long review.]

"Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning" is the 2025 sequel to "Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part 1." Note how the sequel isn't named "Part 2" but instead has a different subtitle. From what I hear, the studio changed a lot of things when the first movie ended up flopping. Let this be a lesson: Tom Cruise's presence doesn't guarantee bank... except perhaps for him and his costars. Directed once again by Chris McQuarrie and starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Greg Tarzan Davis, Holt McCallany, Shea Whigham, Rolf Saxon, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Lucy Tulugarjuk, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, Pasha D. Lychnikoff, Katy M. O'Brian, and Angela Bassett, this new actioner is supposedly the Mission: Impossible franchise's swan song, but I suspect that the team will get together at least one more time to make up for this film's lackluster story and performance. Lackluster story? you ask. Well, first off, there's no Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust: her character is definitively dead. Second, there's poor Tom Cruise's face, now full of loose skin and flapping about in strong air currents because the poor man is 63 (granted: I'm younger than Cruise by a few years, and my pudgy face would flap like a flag in a gale were I in Cruise's place). Third, there's the fact that this movie takes "characters saying the movie's title" to an annoying extreme, with several characters saying some version of "this is the/your/our final reckoning." There's a lot more to talk about, not all of it bad, but let's plunge into the comprehensive summary before we do the deep dive into criticism.

Summary

"Final Reckoning" picks up some months after "Dead Reckoning," as we can tell by the length of Ethan's hair which, like Harry Potter's hair in the Potter movies, continues to lengthen and shorten with every movie. US president Erika Sloane (Bassett) sends Ethan a self-destruct message asking him to turn himself in and to hand over the cruciform key that was the MacGuffin driving the plot of "Dead Reckoning." Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and Benji Dunn (Pegg) find their good friend and teammate Luther Stickell (Rhames) working on a "poison pill" to infect the Entity, the malevolent AI threatening global destruction. To find the location of Gabriel (Morales), Ethan and Benji to go Austria to break Paris the French assassin (Klementieff) out of prison. While there, they encounter intel agents Briggs (Whigham) and Degas (Davis). Briggs is rendered unconscious but Degas is convinced by Ethan—who argues that the Entity wants us all to hate and fear each other as a prelude to war—to join his cause: to kill the Entity. Paris, now liberated, also joins the IMF team. 

Paris's clues lead them to London, where Ethan manages to escape from some American agents with the help of Grace (Atwell), formerly a pickpocket but now a full member of the IMF team. Grace and Ethan are captured, and they meet Gabriel, who gives Ethan the mission of finding the Podkova, a device created from the "rabbit's foot" that was the MacGuffin in "Mission: Impossible 3." The Podkova will give Gabriel control over the Entity, which essentially ousted Gabriel from his former role as its high priest because of his failure to keep the cruciform key in the previous film. Ethan comes to understand that Luther's "poison pill" is meant to slot into the Podkova to distribute its virus. The Entity's endgame seems to be to physically insert itself into the mainframe of a place called the Doomsday Vault, an underground location in South Africa that is an "ark" of human knowledge and civilization, designed to withstand a global war and to last for, theoretically, thousands of years if need be. The Entity's intention is to gain control of the world's major nuclear arsenals, launch strikes in all directions, and re-mold the remainder of humanity into its personal vision of how civilization should rebuild and move forward—basically, with the Entity as the leader and humanity as its slaves. Ethan comes to understand the Entity's intentions when he is led to a coffin-like container containing equipment to allow him to interface directly with the Entity, which shows him through visions purportedly demonstrating the Entity's supreme middle knowledge (i.e. cognizance of all possible outcomes) what the most probable futures are depending on what actions important people, like Ethan and the world's leaders, take. The Entity (and some members of an Entity-worshipping doomsday cult) stress the inevitability of the Entity's vision. Several malefic characters—and one good one—repeat the refrain, "It is written." Ethan repudiates the Entity's vision of the future, which prompts the Entity to deliver a series of painful electric shocks.

The Entity also ominously warns Ethan that someone close to him will die soon, and Ethan understands that this someone is Luther. Running back to Luther's nearby location in London's underground tunnel system (the Entity-interface coffin was in the same system), Ethan finds Luther trapped—by Gabriel—with a multi-megaton bomb and the tools to defuse it, but not enough time to do a complete job. Luther has enough time pull a single one of the several detonators and stop the bomb's full yield from exploding, but the detonator itself, when it explodes, will still be powerful enough to kill him and to collapse the tunnels. Unable to break in to rescue his friend, Ethan listens in pain as Luther tells him "we are both on the right side of that gate," i.e., Luther is where he should be because he can save London, but by dying, he will not be able to make a second poison pill (Gabriel stole the original one from Luther, who is terminally ill). Ethan, meanwhile, is in a position to survive the blast and find the Podkova, something Gabriel—still bizarrely acting like the Entity's prophet despite now wanting to control it—tells Ethan is inevitable.

The submarine called the Sevastopol, which we saw sink in the first film (after the malicious AI made the sub attack itself), created a massive, seismic disturbance on the sea floor way back in 2012. To find the Sevastopol's location, Ethan tasks Benji, Paris, Grace, and Degas with finding the coordinates of the sub's final resting place. This means going to a SOSUS station on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea, full of Russian subs and one aircraft carrier. Ethan, meanwhile, turns himself in to the US president and is given 72 hours to find the Sevastopol's location and stop the Entity. Ethan's reckless plan involves riding an Osprey from the US carrier George HW Bush, commanded by Rear Admiral Neely (Waddingham) out to meet an American sub, the USS Ohio. Ethan's team on St. Matthew Island, meanwhile, needs to send him the coordinates to find the Sevastopol, and the Ohio is to be tasked with listening every two hours for Morse code from St. Matthew Island. Once in the sea after jumping from his Osprey, Ethan is to rendezvous with the Ohio, captained by Jack Bledsoe (Tramell), who will provide Ethan the equipment he needs to dive to the Sevastopol and recover the Podkova. Ethan's team on St. Matthew Island, however, discovers that the SOSUS administrator, William Donloe (Saxon), and his wife Tapeesa (Tulugarjuk) are being held captive by a contingent of Russian soldiers led by Captain Koltsov (Lychnikoff). The Russians want the Sevastopol's coordinates as well, but Donloe—a character who harks back to the very first Mission: Impossible movie—secretly tells Benji that he, Donloe, has them memorized, not written down or saved anywhere.

Having successfully jumped from the Osprey into the frigid sea, Ethan gets cattle-prodded by US divers who suddenly appear and fit him with scuba gear to take him down to the USS Ohio. Once aboard, he tells Captain Bledsoe at least part of his plan—to be dropped off by the Ohio at the Sevastopol's wreck after the Ohio gets the coordinates from Donloe, after which Ethan must try to make it back to the surface alive, and at the correct location, to be picked up by his team—something that everyone around him says is impossible. Ethan is given an experimental diving suit allowing him to dive to crushing depths while, hopefully, still remaining functional. A soldier who is an Entity-doomsday cultist tries to kill Ethan while he's running on a treadmill in the sub to oxygenate himself; meanwhile, all hell breaks loose on St. Matthew Island as Ethan's team suddenly finds itself in a firefight with the Russians. Ethan survives his fight with the help of Navy diver Kodiak (O'Brian) and receives the coordinates from Donloe in time before his deep dive to the Sevastopol's resting place. On the surface, Grace and Tapeesa end up sled-dogging to the ice-covered pick-up site, where they set up a portable decompression chamber since Ethan's hasty swim to the surface from hundreds of feet below will guarantee he gets the bends. Ethan successfully reaches the wreck of the Sevastopol and finds the Podkova, but he is unable to leave the sub without first stripping off all of his gear, meaning he must swim to the surface while constantly exhaling to keep his lungs from exploding. Ethan runs out of breath and gets the bends at roughly the same time, not far from the water's surface, but Grace, who has cut a hole in the ice to await Ethan's arrival, dives in and rescues him, taking him to the decompression chamber. On St. Matthew Island, Donloe's house and listening post burn down in the aftermath of the firefight, but Donloe survives.

The team realizes that the only way to beat both Gabriel and the Entity is to go to South Africa, to the shielded Doomsday Vault, and physically allow the Entity inside—which is what the Entity wants. Before he died, Luther had created a large-capacity drive to allow the team to contain the Entity, which intends to launch the world's nukes from inside the Vault, where it will be safe from global war. The trick is this: Ethan has to insert the poison pill into the Podkova, then Grace and Benji must use Luther's large-capacity drive to trap the Entity inside it before it can launch all missiles. The Entity will think it's launched the missiles, but in reality, it'll be contained inside Luther's "bottle." The act of trapping the Entity must take under a hundred milliseconds, so Grace is chosen to do the deed since great pickpockets are great because of their sense of timing. When Ethan and his team are inside the Vault's tunnels, Gabriel appears with the poison pill and demands the Podkova from Ethan. Ethan's old handler Kittridge (Czerny) also appears and demands both the poison pill and the Podkova; a firefight breaks out, and Benji is shot while Ethan goes chasing after Gabriel, who has escaped. Another of Gabriel's multi-megaton bombs inside the tunnels has its clock triggered by a henchman; there are only twenty minutes left. Kittridge and his man Briggs, a.k.a. Jim Phelps Jr., son of Jim Phelps Sr. (Jon Voigt in the very first movie), also leave the tunnels to reach minimum safe distance. This leaves Donloe, his wife Tapeesa, and Degas to try to defuse the bomb while Benji, Grace, and Paris enter the bowels of the Vault to find the interface into which to plug Luther's hard drive. As they wait for Ethan's signal, Benji develops a tension pneumothorax from his bullet wound, leading to breathing problems, then flickering consciousness. This happens all while he tries to guide Grace through the complicated process of hacking into the Vault's computers. Benji asks Paris in broken French to help relieve the pneumothorax by making a hole high in his chest, then sticking a pen inside to relieve the pressure. The procedure works; trapped air hisses out of the pen, and Benji is temporarily relieved but warns his blood pressure will drop soon, meaning he'll lose consciousness.

Gabriel drives out of the tunnel system to a waiting biplane (analog, therefore unhackable by the Entity). Ethan goes after Gabriel—first with a jeep, then on foot in an insane running sequence, then by latching onto a henchman's departing biplane in another insane action sequence. He eventually catches up to Gabriel—or Gabriel turns around and intercepts Ethan—and Ethan eventually manages to wrest the poison pill from Gabriel as Gabriel, dislodged, comically falls into his plane's rudder and is killed. Ethan inserts the poison pill into the Podkova. The Podkova's signal is sent, Grace manages to trap the Entity inside Luther's "bottle," and the world's nukes fail to launch. The whole globe loses power for a moment, then regains it a moment later. Ethan parachutes to safety and hears Luther's final words to him, recorded in the Podkova. Luther speaks of friendship, faith in Ethan's cause and rightness, and hope for humanity's future, which Ethan has purchased one more time. Another sunrise.

President Sloane, meanwhile, is relieved to have made the decision not to launch missiles before the Entity took everything over—this despite desperate urging by some of her inner circle. One of her generals (Offerman) is killed protecting her from a second doomsday-cult assassin, but in the end Sloane's forbearance is proven to be the right path, and we see a moment in which she leaves Air Force One to meet an honor guard that includes her son.

Back at Trafalgar Square in London, in the aftermath of this adventure, Ethan and his team briefly meet, almost timidly, standing at a distance and exchanging wordless smiles and looks before disappearing to go their separate ways, with a possible promise of adventures to come. Significantly, Grace appears last; she walks up to Ethan and hands him a box, inside of which is Luther's glowing hard drive containing the Entity. Grace had said that Ethan was the only one she would trust with that much power. She'd also said that the Entity could be used to help undo the damage it had caused (at several points, characters mention that destruction of the Entity would mean "the destruction of cyberspace"). And with that, Ethan Hunt disappears into the London crowd, Entity in hand, ready once again to live and die in the shadows for those we hold close and for those we never meet.

Good Points

The editing and the pacing of this supposedly final installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise were both energetic and smooth during most of the action sequences—pretty much what we've come to expect from director McQuarrie and his team. The action set pieces were ambitiously grandiose, especially the Podkova-retrieval scene inside the submarine and the final Ethan-versus-Gabriel biplane scene. As usual, the acting was on point even if some actors aimed for a little too much self-conscious gravitas, from Gabriel to Kittridge on down. Rolf Saxon as William Donloe aged beautifully into his role for this film: his character is older and wiser; he's found love with an Inuit woman and learned to speak her language; he has a look of disappointment and self-sacrifice about him, but he also radiates a kind of inner peace. He and his wife may actually be the happiest characters in the movie. When all is said and done, Saxon played the role convincingly. I bought into the idea that this was a man tempered by experience, both sad and serene. But I have to single out Ving Rhames, as Luther Stickell, for giving us a heartfelt farewell performance that ends with his postmortem voiceover as he gives his final message to Ethan in the aftermath of the crisis; Luther has long been one of the team's most solid members, and if I'm not mistaken, Rhames has been there since the first movie in 1996. I was also very impressed by Pom Klementieff's martial-arts skills: she looked convincingly as if she knew what she was doing. I looked up her bio, and sure enough, she has a years-long background in boxing and taekwondo. Anyone who practices TKD or has followed it for long enough will easily recognize Klementieff's precise and powerful kicks for what they are. TKD has a certain distinct, undeniable look. On film, it usually comes off as crisp, snappy, and impactful. Remember when I complained about the weakness of Zöe Kravitz's kicks in "The Batman"? Kravitz had trained in taekwondo as a child, but she was obviously uncomfortable with her fight choreography. Klementieff, by contrast, performed her moves with ruthless efficiency, and it helps that, while TKD isn't famous as a "street" martial art, it's flashy enough to be very movie-friendly, like many acrobatic kung fu styles. And as for the Entity: As an AI villain, it remained amorphous and abstract, and its threat to human existence felt fairly palpable. The Entity generated an atmosphere of menace and the impression that the stakes, this time, were very high. For all its disappointments, the Entity wasn't all bad as a "villain." (But I've got a lot of negatives to discuss below.)

Bad Points

I had noted that the submarine sequence was one of the film's ambitious action set pieces. However, it wasn't that well paced: I felt the sequence ran way too long, and it began to feel more like something directed by James Cameron ("The Abyss") than a Christopher McQuarrie work. And while many of the action sequences where indeed intensely paced, they were broken up by long periods of exposition, like an early-80s porn movie with too much plot and not enough sex. I wasn't as turned off by the flashbacks to previous movies as other critics were, but the exposition did become too much, and I ended up thinking the movie could have been trimmed by half an hour with little loss to the plot.

Did anyone else think that Luther's illness came out of nowhere? I don't recall him being sick in Part 1, and even when we first meet him in "Final Reckoning," he's got a hospital bed off to the side, true, but he isn't wearing his nasal cannula or sporting an IV. His illness felt shoehorned in, and for no good reason given that Luther isn't felled by illness. What purpose did his sickness serve? Was it supposed to prepare us, the audience, to let him go in the spirit of Oh, well, he's going to die anyway?

The characters' dialogue, whenever a group is together and talking, retains that artificially stilted quality I'd complained about in my review of the previous film: people keep unnaturally ending each other's sentences. As I'd said last time: this is not how natural, human dialogue works: real group dialogue often tends to be more chaotic and interruptive. This movie's artificial exchanges amounted to exposition masquerading as dialogue. And while we're on the topic of lines said by the actors, I'll reiterate what I'd mentioned at the beginning of this review about how the movie's title, "Final Reckoning," is repeatedly said by several characters, especially Gabriel. Beyond corny. And very annoying.

Gabriel, as a villain, is ousted by the Entity as its prophet and high priest, so he really has no reason to continue his shtick about inevitability and how events are "written." But he does continue, which is enough to make me wonder whether he was like this when he'd killed Ethan's lover (seen in flashback) decades earlier. The antagonist remains the same cold, calm presence he'd been the first time around, and this was a missed opportunity to make him more viscerally menacing. Instead, Gabriel, one of my favorite characters from the previous film (despite all the hate that Esai Morales got from critics last time; I'm Morales's lone defender), is reduced in this movie to a cartoon. He uses the same trick over and over, i.e., leaving a multi-megaton bomb as a problem for others to solve, and his motivations seem a bit confused: he says he wants the Podkova to help him control the Entity (which he now hates and wants to enslave, making him no different from other people, like Kittridge, who'd rather harness the Entity's power than destroy it), but his second bomb is placed inside the Doomsday Vault where it can eradicate the Entity once it launches the world's nukes. (I'm not sure, but I think Gabriel's plan was to supplant the Entity, post-holocaust, as the leader of a new human civilization. Some of the dialogue hints at this.) 

The newly cartoonish Gabriel also dies a cartoonish death, carried off his biplane only to slam crotch-first, skull-next into its rudder. That said, it may have been an appropriately random and out-of-nowhere death for a character so convinced of the preordained nature of his path. Or was it? After all, it was Newtonian physics that killed Gabriel, and if you subscribe only to Newtonian physics without accounting for Einsteinian and quantum insights, then you live in a rigidly deterministic universe. In other words, Gabriel's death might appear random and comical to us, but his demise was the inevitable result of forces and circumstances (and even "choices") that led to that very testicle- and skull-crushing moment. So: was Gabriel's death ironically random, or was it ironically deterministic? 

Meanwhile, the Entity itself doesn't seem to have clear motivations for what it does: it wants both to destroy humanity and to enslave it, seemingly relying on the idea that there will still be a humanity to enslave after the nukes launch and the dust settles. We're told that, in theory, the Entity could hide in the Doomsday Vault's shielded mainframe for thousands of years if need be, like a malevolent genie waiting to be released from its bottle.

Entire books could be written about the movie's wrongheaded view of AI and how it's portrayed in this film. Let's face it: since "Final Reckoning" is an action movie first and foremost, it can't be expected to be too smart (which is why good action movies keep their goals, motives, and stakes simple and clear—look at 1987's "Predator," now revered as an action classic). Most of the complaints I'd mentioned in my previous review obtain for this movie, such as: how does the Entity, a mere AI, have any "desires" at all? How can it be, as Ethan seems to think, capable of fear? And if it's capable of fear, is it capable of joy and other emotions? And wouldn't those other emotions, if present, play a role in the Entity's assessment of whether humanity deserves to live? What if a little girl gave the Entity a flower? Why do the Entity's motives seem to be the same as those of so many previous Mission: Impossible villains, many of whom also had plans to reset the world through catastrophe and then start over (see especially "Ghost Protocol")?

Watching the movie twice did help resolve one bit of confusion: where did Ethan get that second parachute after Gabriel had shouted, "I'm the only one with a parachute! Good luck!"—right before he died? I had erroneously taken that shout to be an objective claim that Gabriel's biplane held only one parachute. In watching more closely the second time around, though, I saw the moment where Ethan found the second parachute and strapped it on after Gabriel's corpse had fallen away. But a second viewing didn't resolve another thing I was confused about: if the Doomsday Vault is heavily shielded from malicious transmissions and wartime nuclear radiation, such that the Entity would need to be brought physically inside the Vault to wreak havoc, how was Ethan able to broadcast his virus from miles away after inserting Luther's poison pill into the Podkova? I get that the Podkova controlled the Entity, and the poison pill was designed to make the Entity think it had launched nukes while it was really being contained in Luther's large-capacity drive, but the signal-versus-shielding problem nags at me. How did the tainted Podkova's signal get into the shielded Vault? I might need to watch the movie a third time. Maybe the answer is as simple as, The Vault was still open during this entire sequence.

Quite a few critics sneered at the retconning of the Rabbit's Foot from "Mission Impossible 3," where it was just a biohazard-ish MacGuffin, to make it into the precursor of the Entity. I'm still not entirely clear on this, but I think the Rabbit's Foot became the source code placed into the Podkova—a code that eventually evolved into the Entity... but how it got from the sunken Sevastopol to the rest of the world isn't really explained. Maybe the code escaped (via satellite?) before the sinking of the sub.

"Final Reckoning" was also not a very original film. I saw tropes and scenarios from plenty of other works, only a few of which I'll talk about here. But trust me: for a supposedly final installment, a series crescendo, this was a drearily derivative film. The AI-versus-humanity scenario has, of course, been done to death in all manner of science fiction, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "The Terminator" to "The Matrix" to "Battlestar Galactica" and beyond. When the Entity meets Ethan directly inside that coffin-torture container and shows visions of a possible holocaust, I had flashbacks to "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." Also reminding me of T2 was the Entity's insight that humanity would destroy itself: "It's in your nature to destroy yourselves," said Schwarzenegger's "good" Terminator. The idea of trapping the Entity in Luther's large-capacity drive is familiar to anyone who remembers the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode titled "Ship in a Bottle" (Season 6, Episode 12), in which the malicious holodeck-AI character of Moriarty—Sherlock Holmes's nemesis—is unwittingly trapped inside a simulation he thinks is real, but which is, in fact, a large-capacity drive voluminous enough to allow him and his AI friend to explore the length and breadth of what they think is the galaxy. Pretty much all of the naval sequences in "Final Reckoning"—the aircraft carrier, the Osprey, the USS Ohio, the Sevastopol—reminded me of a mashup of "The Abyss" and "Top Gun: Maverick." When Ethan hitches a ride on the henchman's biplane in his pursuit of Gabriel, he's dragged along the runway in a direct callback to Indiana Jones's doing almost the same thing in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," except at must faster speeds and with no bullwhip.

And here's another complaint about that whole damn Sevastopol operation. The Podkova-retrieval sequence ends with Ethan trying to escape the Sevastopol through a torpedo tube. The tube is too narrow for him to keep his diving equipment on, so he strips it off, exposing himself to Arctic temperatures while being forced to breathe slowly out to keep his lungs from exploding. But the end of the torpedo tube is closed, and we never see how Ethan manages to open it up. I know nothing about torpedo tubes, yet this struck me as mightily implausible. Also: the Sevastopol ends up ponderously rolling to the edge of an underwater shelf; it tips over the edge and begins to descend into the darkness right as Ethan is popping out of the tube. The sub's tail section catches onto Ethan's dive webbing, and he's dragged hundreds of feet lower than his original crushing depth before he can free himself. He now has almost no air left to reach the surface, yet he somehow miraculously makes it to within a few dozens of meters of the ice layer, and Grace conveniently swims down to rescue him. Ethan has the bends, naturally, and Grace bizarrely chooses to remain with him inside the portable decompression chamber—probably a move by the film's writers to increase the potential romantic tension between her and Ethan, who's old enough to be her father, and not for any rational, realistic reason. Also: how the hell did Grace know where to drill her ice hole to pick Ethan up? I get that Ethan was wearing a little location beacon, but with the Sevastopol forever rolling downhill along the continental shelf, that location would have been in constant motion. So how did Grace know where to dig? Every time she stopped to dig, the sub could have rolled even more. Overall, that entire sequence was too long and too unbelievable. I'll give McQuarrie credit for the beauty and ambitiousness of the set design, with all of the Sevastopol's chaotically rolling nuclear torpedos, but that's about it. One last thing: when he's got the experimental scuba gear on, Tom Cruise's nose—already huge—looks comically gargantuan because of the faceplate's fisheye effect. I realize that directors who do diving sequences want their actors' faces visible (James Cameron said as much about filming "The Abyss"), but couldn't someone have designed a better faceplate for Cruise? Or used CGI to make him look less garish?

And finally, a complaint about Tom Cruise's French: it was even worse than in previous movies. When he shouts "Arrête!" at Paris before she can kill Briggs and Degas in Austria, Cruise pronounces his "r" with the tip of his tongue. That's more Spanish or Italian than French. The French "r" generally comes from the back of the throat, like in German. Benji also gets to speak French, but it's quickly established that his character's French is very limited, so at the Doomsday Vault, when he asks for Paris's help in dealing with his pneumothorax, he uses a hilarious mixture of French and English, at one point even shouting, "Un bandage!" when he means "Un pansement!" Pegg's character was established as speaking fluent Russian in "Ghost Protocol," so I guess Benji can't be expected to speak all languages equally fluently.

"Final Reckoning" was almost three hours of derivative story and missed opportunities. The filmmakers could have made Gabriel a lot cooler; they could also have been more inventive in their thinking about the Entity. In fact, let's dwell on that for a second: as I've argued elsewhere, you don't even need a malicious AI to realize the "gray goo" scenario, in which nanorobots—supposedly our helpers—inadvertently cause the destruction of humanity. All you need are these little machines earnestly enacting their programmed imperatives. Build a fleet of self-replicating nanorobots to manufacture paper clips, and with a very primitive algorithm, they'll figure out where to acquire the resources to continue manufacturing and replenish their own numbers—whether those resources are pulled from nature or from civilization doesn't matter. This goes on until the surrounding area is fairly buried in paper clips, and the metallic mountain spreads—while natural resources dwindle as the robots use them—until all life has been either sucked dry or simply buried. The dust of civilization turns to gray goo when the rains come. At no point were the robots malicious: they'd been programmed to create paper clips efficiently, is all. They fulfilled their imperative, and a side effect was the destruction of humanity and the planet's ecology. No evil needed; no need for an AI that can feel fear; no need for a conscious mind—nothing. By this standard, the AI called Skynet in the Terminator films was actually a lot more realistic: its imperative from the beginning was the destruction of a sector of humanity. Everything it did—building tanks and aircraft and humanoid Terminators—was merely an extension of that imperative. And the AI's malice wasn't its own: the original imperative came from people, an irony that T2 is at pains to focus on. But where T2 had clarity on its side, "Final Reckoning" makes less sense.

Predictions and How They Panned Out

I made some predictions in my review of the previous film. So how did those pan out? Let me start by quoting a paragraph from that review:

There's also a risk, story-wise, in making AI the enemy: if it has no shape, form, or center, how do you expect to kill it? The movie "Avengers: Age of Ultron" also failed to give an adequate answer to this question. In that movie, the antagonist Ultron began as an AI that essentially inhabited global computer networks and gained power as it grew. While Ultron eventually created a specific robotic body for itself (which allowed us viewers to focus on something), it still could have distributed itself around the world such that killing the robot body would have done nothing to Ultron's "essence." In "Dead Reckoning," one character specifically claims that the Entity has "no center," but I suspect that, in Part II, we're going to discover that the thing does have a center, in the form of either something physical or its source code. Prediction, then: Part II is going to end the way so many alien-invasion movies do: find the mothership (i.e., the center) and destroy it, thereby destroying all of its ramifying tendrils. As plot devices or tropes go, this is an overused, cliché idea, but I don't see the movie ending any other way... unless the screenwriters decide to go balls-out and end Part II on an inconclusive note, with the possibility that the Entity is out there and will reappear someday. Then again, you could counterargue that "find the center and kill it" is as ancient a trope as shooting an animal in the head. What are animals if not coordinated collections of cells?

The Entity followed Ultron's path by first occupying all of the world's interconnected computer systems, then somehow seeming to concentrate itself into a single, amorphous thing that tries to launch missiles from inside the Doomsday Vault, only to be trapped instead in Luther's "bottle" thanks to Grace's impeccable timing. This reduction from a titanic, shapeless, globe-spanning organism to a tiny, specific data-homunculus trying to leap into a mainframe is the same disappointing arc as Ultron's—going from an expansive, globally networked thing to a specific robot. And this reduction makes no sense: if the Entity really has no center, no main body, then whatever ended up inside Luther's "bottle" is of little consequence. By rights, the Entity should still be out there. But if we follow the movie's logic, either the main part of the Entity or the entire Entity is now trapped inside the bottle, thus rendering it harmless. If so, then my prediction was mostly correct: The Entity does seem to have a "center," and while the entity hasn't been destroyed by the end of the movie (Grace gives Luther's bottle to Ethan, the only person she trusts with such power), its "center" has been trapped, and the thing has been rendered powerless. Find the mothership.

Regarding the cruciform key, I wrote:

I'm also unclear as to what the key does, aside from maybe providing access to the Entity's source code. The movie's opening scene, in which the Sevastopol gets destroyed, seems to show that possessing the key offers no guarantee of control of the AI. So of what use is the key, really? The movie heavily implies the key is the way to the Entity's source code, but it could be that the key has a completely different purpose...

The key turns out to be little more than one device in several fetch quests—a MacGuffin that drives the plot forward to a certain point at about the middle of the film. It's just a means of accessing the AI inside the Podkova. And it turns out that the Russian team on St. Matthew Island has a second key, thus lessening or negating the value of the first key. The Russian team, though, is stymied because it doesn't have the Sevastopol's coordinates, which it hopes Donloe will give up.

Part of me wants to see Gabriel succeed in the next movie; part of me wants to see his stoicism disappear as he's fed feet-first into a wood chipper.

The closest we get to a wood-chipper moment is when Ethan breaks Gabriel's arm while they're fighting high in the sky aboard Gabriel's biplane. At that moment, Gabriel finally drops his stoicism and screams loudly and desperately, comically thrashing his head back and forth. It's not as satisfying as a wood chipper, and it's painfully corny, but that's the definitive moment when Gabriel lets down his guard before his one-note evil grin returns, and he taunts Ethan one final time before his fateful meeting with his plane's rudder. Part of me thinks Gabriel deserved a gorier, more spectacular death. But whatever I think, the movie is made, and the story's been told.

Themes and Big Ideas

Like "Battlestar Galactica," "Final Reckoning" at least superficially deals with the question of whether humanity deserves to survive. The Entity seems to see humanity as potential slaves, but why the Entity needs slaves or desires to lead humanity according to its vision is never made clear (nor is that vision itself). Meanwhile, in movie after movie, Ethan is out there busting his ass to purchase humanity just one more sunrise. For Ethan, at least, the question is settled: choice and freedom are meaningful ideas and values to be cherished, and humanity very much deserves to live if it can somehow get past its urge to destroy itself. It's almost as if Ethan is the one thing standing between all human life and the Great Filter.

The movie doubles down on the theme of choice versus determinism, freedom versus fate—good versus evil. Recall that Luther tells Ethan, existentialist-style, that Our lives are the sum of our choices. Since I've already written extensively on this issue in my review of the earlier film, I'll simply quote myself here:

The movie, which deals with themes like trust and friendship, seems to want to say something about choice and freedom versus predestination, and as I've noted multiple times in the past about other stories, it associates good with choice, freedom, possibilities, and openness; and evil with plans, fate, strictures, and foreknowledge. We've seen this in the Star Wars films: Vader and the Emperor use expressions like If that is your destiny and I have foreseen it to describe their fatalistic interpretation of the Force while Yoda calmly tells us that "Always in motion is the future." In the Matrix movies, Agent Smith sees everything in terms of inevitability while Neo affirms that he persists because he chooses to. In "The Dark Knight," the Joker, despite calling himself an agent of chaos, has the supernatural ability to concoct complicated, Rube Goldberg-like schemes that always somehow come together through a combination of uncanny timing and a series of seeming coincidences, but his plan to have Gotham's citizens kill each other is foiled when the citizens themselves exercise their power of choice and refuse to play the Joker's game. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron creates plans and strategies to dominate the world, but he is undone by the actions of the "humblest" of creatures—the hobbits (we can arguably include Gollum here since he started life as a hobbit himself)—quietly chaotic, under-the-radar beings that Sauron probably had little regard for and whose free agency he probably thought of as beneath his attention. In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Lord Foul the Despiser, a devil-figure in an alternate universe, creates plans within plans while the hero, Thomas Covenant, understands that victory comes through the free exercise of choice.

In the Thomas Covenant and Matrix stories, the enemy is defeated by allowing it to fulfill its plan. It's a kind of metaphysical judo, the ultimate turning of the other cheek. In The Second Chronicles, Covenant lets Lord Foul kill him, thus turning Covenant into an indestructible revenant who forever guards the Arch of Time, and Foul expends all of his insane energy trying to destroy Covenant's ghost, which is only fueled and strengthened by the force of Foul's wrath; in "The Matrix Revolutions," meanwhile, Neo allows the self-multiplying Smith to invade his body so the Machines can delete Smith directly. This act kills Neo, but Smith is defeated. By the same token, Ethan seems to realize that the only way to defeat the Entity is to let it go ahead with its plan, which is how the Entity ends up trapped inside Luther's bottle.

As other critics noted, however, the movie missed an opportunity to deal with the inevitability of aging (like "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"), decreasing relevance, and even increasing impotence in the face of ever-mounting global dangers. I personally would have liked for Ethan to die at the end of this film: wounded but victorious, he listens to Luther's uplifting message about purchasing a new sunrise; he hears Luther say the world still needs Ethan, and with that irony floating like a fog in his head, Ethan bleeds out on the beautiful South African ground, buried in memories of his adventures as he fades. Instead, what we get is an open-ended conclusion that makes a sequel possible, and as I'd said at the beginning of this review, the franchise is going to need a sequel to make up for this disappointing offering.

Conclusion

I realize that a lot of my complaints can be dismissed by the standard Hey, it's just an action movie objection. But I don't want to give a pass to a movie so ambitious in scope that it traffics in the big themes I mentioned above: trust and friendship, choice versus predestination, humanity's inherent worth. These big ideas can't be there merely for decoration, merely as an excuse to drive the action forward. If your movie's going to explore these deep themes, it really needs to explore them. I think, in the end, "Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning" was an earnest effort that had its heart in the right place, but it rather spectacularly failed to deliver. I have to chalk the film up as one of this year's biggest disappointments. Watch the movie for yourself and see whether you like it more than I did.