Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: star/producer Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series reboot of the old TV espionage drama just keeps going and going and going and going and going. We were all assured the eighth entry Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning — delayed multiple times and with an ending price tag rivaling the GNP of most nations — would be the grand finale to end all grand finales and that this was totally it for IMF Agent Ethan Hunt, the stubborn jack-of-all-trades, honorary Olympic athlete, and indefatigable Chosen One whose rotating teams keep saving the world from every former spy turned evil mastermind — all sixteen million of them, whichever ones didn’t go after James Bond first.

Cruise, now 62 and eligible for discount-level Social Security, has prided himself on performing as many of his own stunts as possible, but cannot keep doing this forever, or so we all keep trying to tell him. Whether it’s his unconditional love of making blockbusters or the rewards of heading the Church of Scientology’s most effective outreach program, something’s fueled his deep desire to keep going bigger, faster, louder and jumpier. From the fifth one onward he’s synchronized with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and all but buried the earlier, wobblier installments. The oft-thrilling conclusion to the saga (supposedly) doesn’t quite take the throne of Best Mission Ever, though it isn’t for lack of effort, ensemble, effects, or eagerness to excite.

Like most other long-running film series, it can be hard to remember which ones were which. A handy refresher:

1. M:I: The ’70s-throwback-looking one with the iconic ceiling-dangle heist, where the main villain was a rogue spy.
2. M:I-2: Director John Woo’s third Hollywood-ized Hong Kong action flick veered into self-parody, and the main villain was a rogue spy.
3. M:I-III: The one with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as the series’ best villain, an evil arms dealer who doesn’t disclose his resume but also doesn’t say he was never a spy.
4. Ghost Protocol: The one with the Burj Khalifa jump and the main villain was a rogue strategist, which just sounds silly.
5. Rogue Nation: The one where they turn the Vienna State Opera into a fun house for assassins, set to the tunes from Puccini’s Turandot, and the main villain was a rogue spy.
6. Fallout: The best one in the series, Henry Cavill’s best movie to date (easily edging out Enola Holmes), and the main villains were double-rogue spies who betrayed the previous rogue spy.
7. Dead Reckoning Part One: The one with the terrible title, the dissatisfying To Be Continued, the motorcycle cliff-jump that Paramount previewed in every conceivable advertising medium so many times that it might as well have had its own 24/7 streaming channel…oh, and the main villain was a rogue spy.

Sure, there were other cool explosions, demolitions, chases, races, fights, cameos, character bits, and so, so, SO MUCH RUNNING, but you get the idea. Now we’re at The Final Reckoning, which takes its sweet time getting to the sequence that’ll define its existence whenever Paramount+ subscribers spot it in the main menu. For audiences who can’t recall all the way back to 2023, or who’ve never seen a single Mission before, fret not — McQuarrie and returning co-writer Erik Jendresen (Band of Brothers) cheerfully recap that film more than once and throw in multiple montages of images from the first seven films. These considerate, considerable supplements do pad out the runtime to nearly three hours, but hopefully they curb your impulse to Google all this while you’re in the theater and begging for an Alamo Drafthouse usher to come pour acid on your phone.

Previously on Mission: Impossible: the world and its nuclear arsenals are still under takeover threat by the ubiquitous A.I. called The Entity, which was the least worst option that came up when it asked Siri for a name. Our Heroes survived the Uncharted 2 trainwreck homage at the end and glided away from its head disciple Gabriel (Titans‘s Esai Morales) with Dead Reckoning‘s MacGuffin in hand — the Cruciform key to the long-lost computer containing the original source code they can use to neutralize Hal Skynet and save the world, like any given Tuesday for the IMF.

Of course there are complications that prevent Ethan from ending the film in half an hour. Every government that’s still standing and that can afford a Department of Spies wants the code so they can tame the Entity and have the best military ever. (None of them really show up this time except, whaddyaknow, greedy ol’ America.) Also, in the long months that have passed since the last film, a terminally online doomsday cult has sprung up who yearn for rule-by-Grok and have sleeper agents walking and trolling among us. They’re a perfunctory nod to the awfulness of today’s internet and a cheap plot device for random characters to do sudden, inexplicable heel-turns at exactly the worst moments.

We already learned of the largest problem last time: the code is at the bottom of the Bering Sea inside a Soviet submarine called the Sevastopol that was sunken back in the ’90s. After an obligatory return engagement with Gabriel’s goons in London, it’s time once again for Ethan to assemble Our Heroes for One Last Mission, ostensibly. Welcome the surviving good guys: Ving Rhames’ super-hacker Luther, Simon Pegg’s tech-whiz and backup hacker Benjy, Hayley Atwell’s super-thief Grace, and — newly turned after their previous dust-up — Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Pom Klementieff as Gabriel’s ex-minion, the French leg-breaker named Paris. Whether that’s just a dashed-off nickname or a tribute to her parents’ nationalist pride is never brought up.

Once again they and McQuarrie’s crews hop ’round the globe for a series of extravagant set pieces in exotic locales that were stitched together with rewrites and reshoots after the fact, in the now-standard spy-blockbuster patchwork tradition. However, there’re fewer such locales this time, and fewer set pieces; rather, in what might or might not be his last hurrah, McQuarrie sets aside far more time than usual for scenes of Drama, with meeting-room debates and lengthy emotional exchanges that in some respects lend gravitas to the Entity’s near-future speculative-fiction menace and are an acceptable excuse to let the audience embed with a bevy of heavyweight actors for a while, all of whom chose to accept their mission to make this Mission a tad meatier than usual.

As a value-added bonus to fans susceptible to Pavlovian nostalgia-bells, M:I-8 piles on the callbacks to other entries, sometimes with odd pulls from the quote-unquote “canon”. The numerous clipfests are the most blatant form, albeit razor-edited into barely perceptible split-second snippets for an eventual home-video freeze-framing “match the character to the movie” game. The source code’s storage unit has an unexpected connection to a MacGuffin from a previous sequel whose backstory never got closure. A seemingly minor character from the very first film (American Teletubbies narrator Rolf Saxon) finds new purpose and receives reparations for what Ethan’s shenanigans cost him. And returning Federal agent Shea Whigham gets a surprise secret origin with shallow roots in M:I continuity that amounts to superfluous trivia.

So there’s a lot going on and, fittingly, it takes a while for Ethan to make all the necessary arrangements to locate the Sebastopol in the nigh-infinite oceans without calling in James Cameron, train for a dive that would pulverize a Navy Seal, and inevitably penetrate the sub, whose interiors have turned into a flooded Danger Room slightly different from Rogue Nation‘s underwater Tilt-a-Whirl deathtrap. Meanwhile on the surface, everyone else has jobs to do in the nearest icebound island that’s basically the last pit stop before the Arctic Sea, but at least they get to wear heavy coats while Cruise superheroically swims again like we’ve seen him before.

As always, Cruise is an unstoppable force of nature, unwavering in his dedication to Ethan’s relentless determination, almost an old-fashioned Good Guy in a world of infinite antiheroes. He can’t be tempted or bought, he ain’t got time for angst, and neither fatal wounds nor a case of the bends will stop him from following Captain Cold’s rules of planning: “Make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan.” Ethan doesn’t even blink when he’s informed the climax will come at a cost: taking out the Entity will also take out the World Wide Web and all that entails. He can save the internet or he can save the world. Fortunately for the human race this decision is not up to You, The Viewers at Home.

The action relocates only one more time for the finale, on the opposite end of the planet in South Africa, whereupon Final Reckoning reveals the main event that’ll define its place in the series as The One With the Greatest Biplane Fight in the Last 50 Years of Cinema. It isn’t the first time we’ve seen Cruise riding aircraft in positions their makers never intended, but yet again he, McQuarrie, their stunt design team and the VFX artists in charge of erasing his wires in post-production craft a lengthy, crackerjack daredevil stunt spectacular for the ages, all the more unique in biplane-stunt history considering neither plane has guns. The scene is all about the bravery of barnstorming, not the bombast of bullets. (Never mind the setup, of course: a single line of dialogue explains the absurd excuse why we’re seeing two biplanes in a 2025 film, let alone one. I laughed, but I rolled with it.)

Not everything makes perfect sense, which is par for the M:I course, and I suspect memories of large portions of this sequel may self-destruct in five seconds. But for anyone who’s kept up with the saga, The Final Reckoning is pretty much the capper it ought to be — one last chance for Cruise to sublimate his overextended midlife crisis by getting paid big bucks for his imaginative thrill-seeking; one more round of desperate improvisation during the heat of battle amid shouts of “WE’LL FIGURE IT OUT!”; and one last chance to watch his last remaining friends celebrate teamwork, loyalty, and the novelty of embracing virtue rather than lusting for power. Physical media collectors can rest assured their Mission: Impossible Complete Series 4K 8-Disc Set With Collectible Lithograph of Tom Cruise Running Really Hard will also include a reasonably satisfying endpoint.

…well, mostly. Have we truly bidden farewell to Agent Ethan Hunt, that Loose Cannon Who Doesn’t Take Orders or Play by The Rules? Has Cruise raced his last marathon? Are we finally, completely, totally out of rogue spies? Really? Could someone please go check? I’m sure there’s a database for that, which I sure hope is kept in a guarded and totally impregnable vault that no one can penetrate so it can’t be heisted and put to nefarious use that leaves Cruise no choice but to put on his “Here we go again!” smile and begins making plans to go hang off the side of a NASA rocket heading for the moon.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Academy Award Nominee Angela Bassett IS the President of the United States of America! Her CIA director from Fallout follows the same career path as George H.W. Bush and now rules the Oval Office in unprecedented times. Greg Tarzan Davis (Top Gun: Maverick) is back as Whigham’s partner who sees a lot more action this time. Henry Czerny completes a hat trick as the angry bureaucrat Kittridge from the first M:I who returned for Dead Reckoning and whose stentorian voice really elevated its trailer. Other pencil-pushers in President Angela Bassett’s inner circle who survived last time include Sherlock‘s Mark Gatiss and fellow Maverick veteran Charles Parnell.

New advisors to Commander-in-Chief Ramonda include Parks & Rec‘s Nick Offerman, my personal favorite Holt McCallany (Mindhunter, Fight Club), and Janet McTeer (Jessica Jones, The Menu). Ted Lasso‘s Hannah Waddingham runs an aircraft carrier. Stranger Things‘ Pasha D. Lychnikoff (Sheriff Hopper’s Soviet cellmate) pops in as a Russian baddie.

The best newcomer of all arrives when our man Ethan needs help from the American submarine stationed nearest the Bering Sea, whose eloquent captain is Severance‘s Tramell Tillman. (Alas, Captain Milchick does not throw Ethan a waffle party.) His crew includes Katy O’Brian (The Mandalorian, Twisters), Stephen Oyoung (For All Mankind, John Wick: Chapter 3), and Paul Bullion (Peaky Blinders, Star Wars: The Acolyte).

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning end credits, though they do include uncommon job titles such as Polar Bear Guard, Snake Wrangler (despite a clear lack of snakes), and Musher, which may or may not be relevant to the scene where Agent Peggy Carter commands a team of sled dogs.

Those credits also emphatically do not conclude with a special message such as “ETHAN HUNT WILL RETURN” or “CAPTAIN CARTER WILL RETURN” or even “WE’RE PRETTY SURE AT LEAST BENJI WOULD RETURN”.

But they don’t say “THE END”, either…