‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ movie review: Tom Cruise powers the franchise with punch and panache

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning movie review: Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and the M:I team race against time to defeat the Entity, one adrenaline-charged set piece after another 

Masks, thumping music, missions, exotic locations and Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt running like a bat out of hell to save “those we hold close, and those we never meet,” are all present and correct in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning , the eighth movie in the blisteringly successful franchise.

Two months after the events of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), IMF agent Ethan Hunt has the cruciform key that is one half of the tools required to control/defeat the remorseless AI called the Entity, “a self-aware, self-learning, truth-eating digital parasite infesting all cyberspace.”

The key is needed to unlock the core of the Russian stealth submarine, Sevastopol, which contains the Entity’s source code. Even as the Entity plunges the world into chaos with disinformation and takes control of the world’s nuclear stockpiles one country at a time, Ethan plans to capture Gabriel (Esai Morales), who is working for the Entity.

Luther (Ving Rhames), the computer whiz of the M:I team, is working on creating a poison pill to neutralise the Entity. The poison has to be introduced into Entity in the blink of the legendary eye, which would be the work of the light-fingered thief turned IMF agent, Grace (Hayley Atwell).

Benji (Simon Pegg), intelligence agent, Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and Paris (Pom Klementieff), the laconic French-speaking assassin-turned-ally, round up the team. William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), who was banished to Alaska after Ethan infiltrated the CIA headquarters in the first movie, Mission: Impossible (1996), and his permanently-smiling wife, Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk), offer valuable, analogue help.

On team almost-good guys are Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), former IMF director and present CIA director, intelligence operative Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham), who also has a connection to the first movie, and the U.S. President and ex-CIA chief, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett). They are somewhat good guys because they believe the U.S. should have control of the Entity, while Ethan believes no one person should wield that kind of power.

As with all M:I movies, the hunt for the MacGuffin — this time the hunt for the Entity’s source code in the core of the Sevastopol, whichis sunk in the depths of the Bering Sea — is a nail-biting race against time. The amount of doomsday clocks — from nuclear warheads about to launch and bombs to decompression sickness and downed submarines about to tip into the Continental Shelf — are suitably mind boggling.