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When she’s not scaring herself half to death with the various shows and movies she watches, she likes to unwind by playing video games on Easy Mode and has no shame in admitting she’s terrible at them. She also quotes The Simpsons religiously and has a Blinky the Fish tattoo, solidifying her position as a complete nerd. Replying to the news, one X user noted that “a film that celebrates the essence of cinema will not be screened in cinemas,” an argument that seems to be shared among many movie lovers. The fight choreography is also elevated from previous entries, as other countries send their most special forces after the same prize Ethan is after. The fights are a little more brutal and legitimately feel like the IMF could lose. At this point in the franchise, that’s a difficult tightrope to walk, and McQuarrie and Cruise deserve a lot of credit for that.
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My biggest takeaway from the eighth and very evidently not final film starring Cruise as fate’s chosen lucky boy is that it’s extremely sober. The Final Reckoning veers into melodrama whenever there is story to be told. The cast, which is an assembling of familiar franchise faces and newcomer cameos, whisper-talk their way through soap-opera levels of tension. Nearly every scrap of dialogue is invested in no less than the end of all life on the planet. If you play manga quiz a drinking game pegged to every time someone gravely intones the words “the Entity,” be warned you’ll probably be hammered within the first hour.
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Maybe its not-entirely-successful attempt at tying a neat and all-encompassing bow is the Final Reckoning for the franchise and the path it laid out across 8 movies. From a real world perspective, maybe a messy and self-serious capstone to an otherwise iconic franchise is exactly what they deserve and it’s a perfect subtitle. Lucy is a long-time movie and television lover who is an approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s good to see Ron Saxon back as William Donloe, the CIA analyst baffled by Ethan’s entry into the supposedly impenetrable black vault in the first movie. Likewise Bassett (her second time playing a U.S. president this year, after Netflix’s Zero Day) and Henry Czerny as Kittridge, the ex-IMF chief now heading the CIA. But all the tense meetings at Virginia Emergency Command are staffed by over-qualified actors given too little to do — Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany. Ethan’s bantering rapport with his close collaborators Luther and Benji (Simon Pegg) is always pleasurable, though it’s limited here by how much time Ethan spends globe-hopping solo. Atwell is a welcome presence again, even if her character has lost some of the mischievous charm she had as a thief, becoming more serious and less fun since joining Ethan’s IMF crew and having to learn new skills on the job, like defusing bombs. Then there’s the unfortunate matter of “The Entity.” Introduced in Dead Reckoning, that sentient AI menace is capable of infiltrating the financial institutions, law enforcement and nuclear facilities of the world’s most powerful nations, unleashing chaos.
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Emilia Perez took home plenty of awards, despite its controversial handling of its subject matter. Perhaps a straight-to-streaming option was not the best move for this, as there’s a risk Netflix will simply fail to market it properly, and it’s not going to get a long theatrical run. I’m worried Nouvelle Vague will end up buried among a seemingly endless library, while the streaming giant promotes other titles instead. But I wish someone had explained what exactly these killer cultists expect to get out of serving the Entity. Every time someone says something idiotic like, “The Entity, it wants you to hate me! ” or “Madam President, we’re in the Entity’s reality now,” Final Reckoning lurches further into self-seriousness, which doesn’t sit well on a plot as maddeningly convoluted and, well, silly as this one.
A lot of how I feel about this movie, though, comes down to that subtitle. The Final Reckoning can’t be officially final with the way it ends, and I don’t think there are any of us who believe Tom Cruise is done risking his life for our entertainment. Maybe they completely missed the mark on the “Final” part of the equation, and it’s not a representative title at all.
Gaining control of the Entity is a multipart undertaking, the first step achieved in Dead Reckoning when Ethan took possession of the bejeweled “cruciform” key. The crucial next step is retrieving the source codes from a gadget called the Podkova, which was lost when the Sevastopol, a Russian submarine, vanished on its maiden voyage at the start of Dead Reckoning, thanks to some Entity treachery. Only Ethan knows how to locate it, which is why Gabriel wants him kept alive and President Sloane puts her faith in him, against the advice of her defense and intelligence chiefs. The script works hard to mythologize Ethan as a tragic hero, who can save the world but must go forever unacknowledged, always acting “for the greater good,” but more than once at the cost of someone he loves. Cruise plays all this with corrosive interiority alongside his characteristic physical stamina. But as compelling as his performance is, the movie feels dour and heavy for long stretches at a time.
But I’ve been talking a lot about the things I didn’t like – it’s important to note that there are some things The Final Reckoning very much did right. The action is predictably excellent, with the highlight being Ethan’s infiltration of the Sevastopol, the MacGuffin of a submarine that sank at the start of Dead Reckoning. It is incredibly tense and intricate and claustrophobic and all the other nail-biting things you want from a thriller. More than that, there’s clearly a huge chunk of the reported $400 million budget on screen, and Christopher McQuarrie is getting all the nautical miles he can out of it. The set is equal parts Avatar and the hallway fight from Inception. But despite the expected pluses of slick visual polish, muscular camerawork by Fraser Taggart and a dynamic score by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, The Final Reckoning ends up being a bit on the dull side.
She has written several reviews in her time, starting with a small self-ran blog called Lucy Goes to Hollywood before moving onto bigger websites such as What’s on TV and What to Watch, with TechRadar being her most recent venture. Her interests primarily lie within horror and thriller, loving nothing more than a chilling story that keeps her thinking moments after the credits have rolled. Many of these creepy tales can be found on the streaming services she covers regularly.
The existential threat of Artificial Intelligence, starting with its incursions into privacy and security, is all too real, as is the notion of a cyber force manipulating the truth. But renegade AI programs make incredibly boring supervillains, and the scariest part is that we’re bound to see a bunch more movies about them. It’s a relief when uber-cool assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) — now on Ethan’s team and eager to ice Gabriel, her former employer — grabs a machine gun and starts mowing down Russians in the Arctic Circle. Reviews of the latest movies so you’ll know whether you should spend your money seeing a film in a theater or wait until it hits cable.