This Box Office Flop Is Suddenly A Top Movie On Streaming

HuffPost has republished this piece now that “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is streaming on Paramount+.

There are no post-credits scenes in the “Mission: Impossible” movies. There easily could be. Audiences are now conditioned for them, thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And since there’s always another impossible mission right around the corner, a post-credits teaser would be an easy way to signal what’s coming next and keep audiences speculating during the years-long wait between entries.

Instead, each “Mission: Impossible” film feels like a stand-alone adventure. There’s no homework you need to do before heading to the latest movie. No need to rewatch the previous story or read up on some forgotten character who’s about to make a cameo. For over three decades, the franchise resisted the seemingly irresistible trend of the cinematic universe and its trademark post-credits teaser.

“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” from writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, still doesn’t have a post-credits scene, but in almost every other way, it feels like the mediocre byproduct of an overextended cinematic universe.

This is a movie that expects you to be deeply familiar with the entire franchise, from forgotten minor characters to decades-old MacGuffins. The result is perhaps the most disappointing installment in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise so far, even if its breathtaking final act is enough to redeem “The Final Reckoning” from failure.

The plot of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” is so unimportant and nonsensical that it’s barely worth explaining. Here are the broadest of strokes: a sentient artificial intelligence called The Entity (established in 2023’s “Dead Reckoning”) has sparked global chaos by flooding the internet with misinformation. Against a backdrop of political infighting and martial law, The Entity begins to hack into nuclear missile systems around the world, threatening to wipe out humanity unless it’s installed as ruler of Earth.

With just days left to avoid an apocalypse, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his Impossible Mission Force team set out on a globe-spanning adventure to save humanity. This involves locating a sunken nuclear submarine at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean that contains The Entity’s source code, and then traveling to a doomsday bunker in South Africa for a final showdown.

None of the above necessarily makes for a bad movie, although the plot is sometimes so contrived it becomes impossible to follow (I also would have liked to see a bit more of the global chaos that’s teased in one opening scene, but never comes up again). The real problem is how obsessed “The Final Reckoning” is with franchise history. From the opening credits, which feature a montage of moments from previous films, to pivotal plot points that revolve around a character we haven’t seen since 1996’s “Mission: Impossible” and a deadly weapon only mentioned in 2006’s “Mission: Impossible III,” there’s enough cameos and callbacks stuffed into “Final Reckoning” to confuse even the most die-hard fans.

The choice to make artificial intelligence the movie’s chief villain also feels like a mistake. “The Entity” was probably an exciting idea in 2019 when the two-part blockbuster was first announced. But in the years since, we’ve been bombarded with endless claims that AI is on the verge of changing the world, while all it actually seems capable of doing is organizing shopping lists and producing ugly art.

Even worse, this amorphous digital blob robs “The Final Reckoning” of having an exciting human villain. An enigmatic Esai Morales does his best as the assassin Gabriel (who was previously in league with The Entity but now wants to control it), but he’s never given clear motives or enough of a personality to fill that void.

On the plus side, the threat of a nuclear apocalypse does give us an engrossing subplot in which the U.S. president (Angela Bassett) has to decide whether to initiate a strike against The Entity before it’s too late. These scenes, shot by cinematographer Fraser Taggart with heavy shadows and tilted angles, play like a tribute to classic political thrillers of a bygone era — think “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Three Days of the Condor,” or even “Dr. Strangelove.”

Thankfully, none of these filmmaking blunders matter once the movie reaches its final act, which features the gasp-inducing airplane stunt Paramount has been using to market this movie since 2022.

It was worth the wait, and the scene, in which Cruise leaps midair between a pair of brightly colored two-seater planes, is the kind of death-defying sequence that’s defined the “Mission: Impossible” franchise for decades. No other movie can come close to what “The Final Reckoning” accomplishes here, thanks to both Cruise’s willingness to risk his own life and his innate ability to understand exactly where he is within the camera’s framing at all times and act accordingly.

Even if the exact reason Cruise’s character needs to leap between planes is unclear or uninteresting (something about a digital “poison pill” designed to confuse The Entity), the result speaks for itself. Those last 30 minutes more than make up for the Marvel-esque dreck that leads up to it, establishing “The Final Reckoning” as one of the most entertaining movies of the summer, and maybe of the entire year.

See “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” on the biggest screen you can find. And if you need to step out to use the bathroom at any point, just make sure to do it within the movie’s first two hours, before Cruise and the rest of the IMF arrive in South Africa for that astounding finale.

“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” is streaming on Paramount+.