Worth seeing:

for the mind-boggling stunts up in the air and at the bottom of the ocean but don't think too hard about decoding the overlong and overly complex narrative

Director:	Christopher McQuarrie
Featuring:	Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Angela Bassett, Charles Parnell, Esai Morales, Greg Tarzan Davis, Hannah Waddingham, Hayley Atwell, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Mark Gatiss, Nick Offerman, Pom Klementieff, Rolf Saxon, Shea Whigham, Simon Pegg, Tramell Tillman
Length:	169 minutes
Certificate:	12A
Country:	US
Released:	21st May 2025

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

So – where were we – oh yes – Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team of off-grid agents have been trying to find a mysterious key to save the world from an AI entity known as – yes – the Entity. They believe the key can help them find the source code, which will allow them to destroy it.

But both Ethan’s nemesis, Gabriel (Esai Morales) and the CIA boss Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) are also trying to get the source code, so that they can control the Entity for their own nefarious purposes.

The Entity itself is planning to take control of all the world’s nuclear weapons facilities and wipe out the entire global population.

In a race against time – and each other – Ethan, Gabriel and Kittridge travel the world – from the skies to the bottom of the ocean to preserve humanity – and ensure their own vision of what should come next.

WHAT’S IT LIKE?

It’s been a 29 year journey to get to what’s supposedly the final film of Tom Cruise’s big screen adaptation of the 1960s TV hit. Over the course of eight films, assisted by side-kicks including Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Hayley Atwell, Emmanuelle Béart and Michelle Monaghan, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has saved the world many times over, with increasingly elaborate stunts, performed by the star and producer himself.

When you’ve devoted so much time to a franchise, you feel that deserve a big climax and visually, you certainly get that – from a solo mission to a sunken submarine at the bottom of the Barents Sea to a bi-plane chase in the skies above South Africa. The film will leave you breathless.

The narrative is bonkers – with as many as four different sets of people trying to find the same three maguffins – all around the world, at every altitude. But there is so much action that it keeps your attention through its overinflated near 3 hour running time. It wasn’t just nearly 3 hours for this one either – the previous episode, Dead Reckoning Part One was similarly long – and no self-respecting film maker should need more than 5 and a half hours to tell, essentially, one story.

And what – by the way – happened to Dead Reckoning Part Two? Why rebrand the two-part film half-way through?

While Ethan Hunt is meant to be leading a team of agents, he spends most of this film fighting to save humanity alone – it’s almost like Tom Cruise sees himself as Jesus having to shed his disciples to be our saviour.

While the two main action sequences – in the submarine and the biplane scene – are impeccable in their precision and constantly nail-biting, they feel so big that you forget about almost everything else in the film – the other two hours almost might as well not exist. And the stunts in Part One – in particular the motorbike driving off a cliff and the train dropping, carriage by carriage, into a ravine – actually felt more real, more appropriate, more exciting – and the story didn’t feel as tangled.

There’s very little humour or even light relief – although the plot doesn’t really allow for much of that anyway – and there’s a handful of throw-backs to earlier films, but to their credit, the film begins with a helpful montage for anyone who might not be up to speed on the M:I canon.

Will it be the final film in the franchise? Tom Cruise is getting older, after all – well into his 60s now – but he still seems every bit as keen to do his own stunts. But when those stunts become the raison d’etre for the film and you’ve done everything from the bottom of the ocean to the skies above South Africa, where else is there to go – space? And what greater enemy could there be than an artificially intelligent Entity that you can’t see, but that gets everywhere, into everything, spreads false news, acquires cult-like followers and almost succeeds in wiping out humanity. Anything after that would feel like an anti-climax – perhaps even more disappointing than saying goodbye to Ethan Hunt.