2025 - MISSION IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING, overlong supposed wrap up to the series

Supposedly the final film in the series, well maybe.  The plan was to tie together all the previous films in the series and do call outs to characters who had appeared in those films.The result was this overlong mess of a film that drags on for almost 3 hours.  Apparently no one could tell producer Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie that audiences have very short attention spans.

 

The major problem and simple fact is that the audience knows nothing will happen to Tom Cruise. In spite of any danger he gets into, you just know he is going to triumph.  A ridiculous biplane chase scene at the end although well staged and photographed is just unending because Cruise has to survive.  

 

The fact that for almost 3 hours the audience sits though this weird plot about an evil AI about to destroy the world with all it's high tech hardware and only Tom Cruise flying around in a bi-plane can stop it is almost a call back to Charles Schultz's cartoon dog Snoopy pretending to be a World War  flying ace fighting the Red Baron while sitting on his doghouse. 

  

The film has a large cast but really it's all about unsurprisingly Tom Cruise.  Bringing back some of the characters from the first film and killing off one of the original members of the team really means next to nothing.

 

Expensive and slickly made for a film that was to be the final hurrah in the series it's just a big letdown.  Also this really isn't the end of the series since the open ended epilogue with the characters certainly leaves the film wide open for another improbable mission.  However this was a box office disappointment so it's hard to know if Tom Cruise as Ethan Hawk will show up again.

The film was written by Christopher McQuarrie qnd Erik Jendresen,  the running time is 170 minutes.