Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett
Directors: Christopher McQuarrie
Platform: In cinemas from 23 May
Star rating out of 5: ★★★ 1/2
It’s been a long road. Seven films. Dozens of death-defying stunts. Countless masks, gadgets, betrayals, and impossible missions accepted. And now, The Final Reckoning lands with the weight of a franchise that knows it has to stick the landing — not just with spectacle, but with soul.
And you know what? It mostly does.
This isn’t the breathless, bullet-train ride that Fallout was. Nor is it the stripped-down, lo-fi cool of the first film. Instead, The Final Reckoning is a reflective, surprisingly emotional curtain call — a film about ghosts, consequences, and what it costs a man to keep saving the world when the world keeps changing the rules.
Yes, there’s a plot. Something about a looming apocalypse, an evil AI nemesis, and, as usual, the threat of the collapse of civilisation as we know it. But if you’re here for clear geopolitical logic, you’re reading the wrong review and, I’d argue, watching the wrong film.
These films have never been about what Ethan is fighting — it’s always been about how.
And in The Final Reckoning, the how is still utterly, gloriously insane. Cruise jumps into freezing oceans, plummets towards speeding Russian submarines, and pilots small planes with one foot on the joystick and the other in the wind. The man makes gravity look like a personal challenge.
But there’s a weight here we haven’t seen before. Maybe it’s the pacing — deliberate, and a touch mournful at times. Maybe it’s the long, lingering shots of Ethan’s face: a little more lined, his eyes just a bit more haunted. This is a man who’s given everything, lost nearly everyone, and still can’t stop. Because stopping means reckoning with everything he left behind.
Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa gets a dignified final act, and Hayley Atwell, now firmly in the fold, continues her sharp, funny, and grounded performance in a way the franchise badly needed. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames are the film’s emotional ballast. Even the villain, this time, isn’t just a moustache-twirling madman, but a scar from Ethan’s past made flesh.
Is it perfect? No.
The middle stretch could’ve used a trim, and not every emotional beat lands quite as hard as it wants to. There’s a sense the film is torn between closing the loop and keeping just enough doors ajar, because… what if this isn’t the last one?
But for a series that started nearly 30 years ago, The Final Reckoning is as graceful an exit as you’re likely to get from the world of blockbuster espionage.
In the end, what lingers isn’t the explosions or the chases (though they are, as always, magnificent). It’s the feeling that maybe, just maybe, we got to watch a real-life movie star do the impossible. Not just on screen, but off it. To hold the line. To fight against an industry slipping into soulless spectacle. And to keep giving us something real, something to draw us out of our homes and into the multiplexes.
So, here’s to you, Tom Cruise.
For running when you didn’t have to.
For hanging off planes when no one asked.
For caring. For trying.
Thank you for your service to cinema.