Dead Final

I made it through Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025), and I enjoyed it - but I wouldn't call it good...

I don't think I'll try to recap. As you remember, in our last episode, a super-AI is taking over the world, and only Tom Cruise can stop it. I found this part of the movie very Scientology coded. The AI controls us by lying to us and trying to divide us, sow distrust through misinformation, make us fight each other. Again and again, the Impossible team try to reason with their human adversaries, offer team up for mutual benefit. Fortunately, they usually refuse, for the sake of a good action scene. 

And there are action scenes aplenty, including a frankly silly biplane fist-fight. It looked like an amazing feat of stunt-work, and just not that exciting. We also had characters aplenty, pretty much everyone from the team including recent additions Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff, with Shea Whigham as the son of Jim Phelps - going back to the first MI. There are also plentiful flashbacks to the whole series, and also flashbacks to points in the movie that happened while we were looking at something else. This got a bit confusing for me. At one point, Cruise and a baddy are in a discussion while the rest of the team are either in the room, or in a flashback - I'm not sure. 

There's a nice callback to an earlier movie - Rolf Saxon as a disgraced agent exiled to an Aleutian island post, where he met and fell in love with a Native woman, Lucy Tulugarjuk. It was kind of sweet, plus allowed a dramatic dogsled rescue. I think the dogs were all CGI, sadly. 

I was a little disappointed that the super-AI's manipulation of reality was a bit crude. I thought Dead Reckoning made it a little more psychedelic. Here, everyone knows what it's doing but falls for it anyway. I guess that's pretty realistic, but disappointing. However, there is a scene where the AI communicates directly to Cruise's mind in a sensory deprivation tank. When he gets out, he asks, "Is this real?" I'm still seeing Scientology influence. 

Also, Ving Rames gets killed and has a long recorded posthumous monologue. We call this a Tasha Yar. 

With a runtime of 2-2/3 hours, there was a lot of fat on this one. But of course, that means you're getting your money's worth. It also means I now owe Ms. Spenser, who skipped this entirely, at least two choices of normal length movies.