We never learn exactly who Ethan was before the IMF, what Gabriel meant to him, or how much this film is about him living with the losses of Ilsa and Luther. Furthermore, even Shea Wigham’s threat that they would have “a reckoning” when this is all over—which comes after the limp reveal that Agent Briggs is actually Jim Phelps Jr.—culminates in nothing more than a handshake and hug.
The ending of “the Final Reckoning” is treated like an afterthought.
In one sense, this is no dealbreaker. Even the best Mission films, which I count Cruise and McQ’s partnership on Fallout and Rogue Nation as the pinnacle of, have never been “plot movies.” With the exception of maybe the first film’s techno thriller elements, every M:I flick is about the spectacle and/or the fun of the team dynamics. They are affirmations of Cruise’s movie stardom achieving an almost religious apotheosis.
Yet by marketing the eighth film as the last one, Final Reckoning set expectations its star clearly had no intention of meeting. In retrospect, we should have believed Cruise back in 2023 when he said “I hope to keep making Mission: Impossible movies until I’m [Harrison Ford’s] age.” So the end of Final Reckoning is no ending at all for the franchise, which which becomes a problem when it fitfully attempts to emulate the gravity of franchise closers like The Dark Knight Rises, No Time to Die, and Avengers: Endgame (at least in terms of Iron Man and Black Widow).
There are no real goodbyes in Final Reckoning, but the movie is still almost certainly a farewell of sorts—to this iteration of the franchise which began a decade ago. McQuarrie is, again, the greatest collaborator Cruise has ever found on this series. They created the platonic ideal of what a Mission film should be in Rogue Nation and then elevated it to rarified, god tier levels within the action genre in Fallout. But it would seem McQuarrie has pushed his messianic interpretation of Ethan to a breaking point. That becomes more pronounced, too, when considering the latest entry began production during COVID and ended it on the other side of the labor strikes of 2023, causing its budget to reach a reported $400 million zenith. That is a record no studio will ever want.
Still, I suspect if anyone can convince a studio to invest in a franchise even after that kind of budget explosion, it’s Cruise. And until relatively recently he has kept the Mission films healthy and exciting by bringing in new directors who radically reinvent it in terms of tone, aesthetics, and even interpretations of the central character. Cruise’s all-American farmboy turned spy in Brian De Palma’s original film is not the Kung fu-kicking rebel in John Woo’s M:I2, and neither are convincingly J.J. Abrams’ familiar schtick of a suburban everyman (or woman) who has an espionage secret in the closet.
