‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ review: Tom Cruise defies all

This is the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who keeps the machinery well-oiled and smoothly running, even when cutting among multiple lines of action.

By Manohla Dargis

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 AI’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.

This is the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who keeps the machinery well-oiled and smoothly running, even when cutting among multiple lines of action. (He shares screenwriting credit with Erik Jendresen.) Shrewdly, he often uses a similar approach when the pace slows and characters convene to explain what’s going on and why (mainly to us), cutting from one person to another, as each delivers a helpful sentence or two. This conversational turn-taking livens up all the information-heavy explanations and helps feed the forward momentum. None of it makes any sense, of course, no matter how sincerely the actors say their lines, yet everything flows.

Logic isn’t the reason movies like this exist or why we go to them, and one of the sustaining pleasures of the “Mission: Impossible” series has been its commitment to its own outrageousness. Cruise’s stunts have always been among the most outlandish and most memorable attractions in the series, which was spun off from the 1960s television show of the same title. He stepped into the role by escaping a wall of water and descending spiderlike into a luminously white, high-security vault, hanging by an unnervingly thin rope. The entire thing popped with cool stunts, striking locations, exotic doings and the sheer spectacle of Cruise’s intense physical performance.

Why does he keep going? Cruise has been in better, more critically acclaimed movies, but he’s most famous for — his stardom best appreciated in and signified by — the “Top Gun” movies and the “Mission: Impossible” series. In each, his characters demonstrate extraordinary, even preposterous abilities, yet the movies only finally work because Cruise always makes sure that you see them — and him — sweat. He puts in the hard work for these diversions, and he wants you to know it, whether Ethan is baring his nearly naked body, as he repeatedly does in “Final Reckoning,” or is clinging to a biplane in midair, the rushing wind pulling his face into a Francis Bacon-style grimace.

There’s vanity in Cruise’s commitment to extremes, and perhaps mania — who knows? Whatever makes him tick and inspires him to keep pushing and testing his limits is an open question, if presumably less relevant to viewers than whether the movies are actually worth seeing. “Final Reckoning” is flat-out ridiculous, but it’s a model example of blockbuster entertainment at its most highly polished, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, despite its clichés, extravagant violence and gung-ho militarism. Among other things, there is something reassuring in the sight of a diverse group of male and female employees from both the government and military ready to sacrifice all for the greater good.

Male-driven action movies often have a savior complex, with heroes who are beaten and brutalized only at last to rise vengefully triumphant. “Final Reckoning” leans hard into that familiar theme — the team faces betrayal, the fate of everyone on Earth is in Ethan’s hands — which gives the movie a quasi-religious dimension. That’s weird, no doubt, but there’s something plaintive about Ethan’s fight this time because it echoes the urgent struggles of workers in the entertainment industry (and everywhere else) to prevent their replacement by artificial intelligence. For years, Cruise has put on a very good show pretending to nearly die for our pleasure; now, though, his body really does seem on the line.

‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’

Rated PG-13 for action-movie violence. Running time: 2 hours 49 minutes. In theaters.