Mission Impossible Final Reckoning: A tepid farewell to Ethan Hunt
Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning (Mission Impossible 8) marks what is said to be Ethan Hunt's final mission in the long-running action franchise. Headlined by Tom Cruise, the film features a strong ensemble including Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett, and Esai Morales. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie and co-produced by McQuarrie and Cruise himself, the film attempts to close out the decades-old saga on a high note. With striking visuals captured by cinematographer Fraser Taggart and tightly cut sequences edited by Eddie Hamilton, the movie aims for both scale and precision. The background score, composed by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, underscores the tension and drama that unfolds. Released in India a week ahead of its global launch, this final chapter carries the pressure of delivering an unforgettable farewell. But does it live up to that promise?
Story
Ethan Hunt reunites with his IMF team for a mission that could decide the fate of the world. This time, their adversary is no ordinary villain but a sentient AI known as The Entity, a rogue intelligence with the power to disrupt global stability. The threat intensifies with the reappearance of Gabriel (Esai Morales), a mysterious and ruthless figure linked to Ethan's past. In a devastating twist, Gabriel eliminates Luther (Ving Rhames), seizing a critical component called the 'Poison Pill.' With global security at stake, Ethan receives direct orders from the President for one last operation—an urgent and perilous quest that will test his limits. What ensues is an emotionally charged, adrenaline-fueled ride through betrayal, action, and sacrifice.
Performances
Tom Cruise remains the driving force of the movie, showcasing his relentless commitment to performing high-risk stunts. Whether navigating intense underwater scenes or piloting a small aircraft in suspenseful aerial sequences, he consistently captures the audience's focus. However, despite his physical prowess, his emotional delivery feels somewhat robotic and lacks the warmth needed to truly connect with the audience.
Hayley Atwell adds strength to her role but at times her performance feels a bit forced and cheesy, which detracts from the sincerity of her character. Simon Pegg offers moments of levity that help balance the film's more serious tones, and the chemistry among the cast feels natural and effective. Pom Klementieff did well in the limits of her role. Her looks and performance stands out.
An unexpected highlight is Rolf Saxon's return as William Donloe, a nod to the original 1996 installment. His presence not only sparks nostalgia but also enriches the story, providing emotional resonance for longtime followers of the series.
Technicalities
Under the direction of Christopher McQuarrie, the film delivers striking action and sharp visuals, though the storytelling could have benefited from better pacing and refinement. A more concise duration—preferably under two and a half hours—might have made the narrative more engaging, particularly in its latter portions.
Fraser Taggart's cinematography stands out, especially during the underwater and high-altitude scenes, capturing intensity with precision. The score complements the film's tone well, enhancing key moments without overwhelming them. While the editing does its job for the most part, a few sequences could have been trimmed to maintain momentum. As expected from the Mission: Impossible series, the technical craftsmanship and production quality remain consistently high.
Analysis
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (Final Recording) is just an okay movie. It could have been a lot better. It doesn't really feel like an original Mission Impossible film, it's dragged out, slow, and the plot is easy to predict and crack.
While the stunts are decent, they feel fewer and less impressive compared to earlier installments, especially when compared to the earlier films in the franchise. If this is truly the final closure to a massive franchise that has lasted over 40 years, the movie should have delivered much more. It should have honored the Mission Impossible: legacy instead of focusing on an emotionally flat and somewhat confusing narrative.
The emotional quotient felt lacking. It wasn't clear why Ethan Hunt was portrayed as so sorrowful, and if this really was his farewell, it didn't land with the impact it deserved. The movie failed to build enough tension, especially toward the climax and ending, which should have been much more thrilling and satisfying for a supposed final chapter.
Rating: 2/5
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
3 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Tom Cruise to receive honorary Oscar: Is a competitive win still possible?
Tom Cruise will finally be receiving an Oscar after decades in the film industry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had announced earlier this week that he would be given an Honorary Oscar at the 2025 Governors Awards in November, celebrating his lifetime contributions to cinema, Deadline reported. The Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning actor, who at 62 is still one of Hollywood's most bankable and enduring stars, has never taken home a competitive Oscar despite being nominated four times. Tom Cruise to receive honorary Oscar by the Academy.(Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP) The Academy said that the honorary recognition is for Cruise's 'extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement', particularly for his commitment to enriching theatrical experience, to the filmmaking and stunt communities. Cruise will be honored alongside production designer Wynn Thomas, choreographer and actor Debbie Allen, and Dolly Parton, who will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Also Read: Mission accomplished? Tom Cruise is finally getting an Oscar but its not for any of his films Although Cruise is being bestowed with the honorary recognition, the big question remains: Will this end the Mission: Impossible actor's chances of winning a competitive Academy Award? Well, history suggests otherwise. Past Oscar winners prove an honorary award doesn't end the race As per Deadline, actors like Paul Newman and Henry Fonda both received honorary Oscars before they won Best Actor in the very next year. Additionally, Laurence Olivier, who won an Honorary Oscar in 1947, clinched Best Actor two years later. Harold Russell took home both an Honorary and a competitive Oscar in the same year. Some stars like Peter O'Toole initially resisted the gesture in fear that the honorary accolade was a consolation; they went on to receive further nominations. Moreover, figures outside of acting, like Ennio Morricone and Spike Lee also turned their honorary recognition into competitive wins later. The Deadline report added that the timing for Tom Cruise may be auspicious, too. The actor is currently filming a project with Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. The Birdman filmmaker's next project is expected to release next year, which places it squarely in the running for the 99th Academy Awards. Tom Cruise could still find himself holding the elusive golden statue if the performance matches the prestige. So, while November's honorary award marks long-overdue recognition, it doesn't close the curtain on Cruise's Oscar journey. It might just be the prelude to his biggest role yet, an Oscar winner. FAQs Why didn't Tom Cruise win the Oscar? Despite four nominations, Tom Cruise has faced tough competition each time. His performances were critically acclaimed, but others edged him out during award season. Why is Tom Cruise getting an honorary Oscar? The Academy is recognizing Cruise for his lifetime contribution to cinema, including his work as an actor, producer, and champion of theatrical experience. Has Tom Cruise ever been up for an Oscar? Yes. He has been nominated four times: twice for Best Actor (Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire), once for Best Supporting Actor (Magnolia), and once as a producer for Best Picture (Top Gun: Maverick).
Time of India
6 hours ago
- Time of India
US strikes Iran: How Tom Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick eerily predicted Donald Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer
When Top Gun: Maverick stormed theatres in 2022, it wasn't just a sequel—it was a resurrection. It defied every law of modern franchise gravity. No multiverse. No Marvel. No brooding they-them anti-hero. Just the return of a square-jawed cis-American icon doing exactly what he did 36 years ago—only faster, louder, and with a bigger sonic boom, looking like the folks at Scientology had finally found the Fountain of Youth. What made it work? First, it respected the original. No irony. No winks. No smug Gen Z subtext. Tom Cruise didn't hand over the keys—he repossessed the plane, flew it through a canyon at Mach 1.6, and landed it on an aircraft carrier with his grin cryogenically preserved in confidence. Kenny Loggins was still on standby. The soundtrack still slapped. The opening still had that slow-mo montage of jets and muscle, set to a synth-and-snare build-up so patriotic it practically handed you a Coors Light and called you "sir. " There was shirtless beach football. Beer without guilt. Bros being bros in the golden light of American masculinity. Maverick didn't just bring back a movie—it brought back a memory. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Eat 1 Teaspoon Every Night, See What Happens A Week Later [Video] getfittoday Undo Of the good old days, before drone warfare, before greyzone psyops, before movies needed three disclaimers and a trigger warning. A time when war was sexy, the rules were simple, and the only labels that mattered were 'friendly' and 'bogey on your six.' Second, it was real. Practical stunts. Real G-forces. No Marvel mush or green-screen gibberish. You felt every dive, every roll, every breath in a cockpit that looked more like a coffin. In an age of CGI fatigue, Maverick reminded viewers what cinema used to feel like—sweaty palms and pounding heartbeats, set to the scream of a jet engine. But above all, Top Gun: Maverick gave audiences something even rarer: sincerity. It wasn't cynical. It wasn't ashamed of heroism. It put on aviators, turned up the volume, and said: "Let's go." Top Gun Maverick Beach Scene 4K IMAX And go it did—straight into the heart of America's foreign policy theatre. Because what looked like a nostalgia-fuelled testosterone trip in 2022 now feels like something far more uncanny in 2025. As President Donald Trump orders a massive stealth strike on Iran's Fordow nuclear facility, Maverick doesn't look like a movie anymore. It looks like a propehcy. A daring pre-emptive strike. An underground uranium plant. A ticking clock. A threat not to America, but to unnamed "allies in the region." What once felt like high-octane fantasy is now playing out, almost scene for scene, in the skies above the Middle East. And Tom Cruise? He wasn't just making a sequel. He was filming the trailer for Trump's next war. The Anti-Woke Hit That Soared When Maverick dropped, it didn't just break box-office records—it broke Hollywood's progressive chokehold on patriotism. No identity politics. No postmodern angst. No war guilt disguised as character development. Just raw American adrenaline, jet-fuelled storytelling, and Tom Cruise doing what Tom Cruise does best—defying gravity and cultural trends alike. Even Jon Hamm showed up, having shed the whiskey-soaked aura of Don Draper to play a tight-laced, by-the-book commander who looked like he personally banned pronouns from the base. You could almost smell the Aqua Velva. The cast was tailor-made for culture-war glory. Miles Teller stepped in as Rooster—Goose's mustachioed legacy—looking like he belonged on a recruitment poster for bros who bench for liberty. Monica Barbaro played Phoenix, the token female pilot who neither lectured nor got lectured—just flew like hell and left feminism on mute. Glen Powell's Hangman was Iceman 2.0: arrogant, tanned, and ready to drop a snide remark along with his payload. Jennifer Connelly was there too, ageless and cool, running a bar where no one talks politics. No lectures. No apologies. Just call signs, dogfights, and sweat-drenched montages scored to the sound of American confidence. Reagan Redux: Top Gun Was Always Propaganda Top Gun (1986) Official Trailer - Tom Cruise Movie The 1986 Top Gun wasn't just a movie—it was Cold War propaganda with better hair. The Pentagon handed over carriers, jets, and script suggestions. Hollywood returned the favour by air-dropping a generation of recruits into Navy flight school. It was recruitment wrapped in romance and set to guitar riffs. Maverick followed the same flight path. The military offered full support. The Navy looked like gods. But this time, there was a twist: the enemy was unnamed. No Soviet MiGs. No al-Qaeda. Just a faceless rogue nation with a uranium facility in the mountains. The target? An underground enrichment site. The mission? Destroy it before it becomes operational. The threat? Not to America—but to our unnamed "allies in the region." Nobody said Iran. Nobody said Israel. And yet everybody knew. That narrative sleight of hand—so brazen in its vagueness—would soon feel less like creative license and more like strategic foreshadowing. Scene for Scene: Trump's Iran Strike Mirrors the Film In June 2025, President Trump—new term, same instincts—ordered a real-world operation that bore eerie resemblance to Maverick. Seven B-2 bombers took off from the US under the cloak of midnight. The mission: Operation Midnight Hammer. The target: Iran's Fordow uranium enrichment facility, buried in the mountains near Qom. A site designed to withstand everything short of Armageddon. A site built for this very moment. In Maverick, the enemy is never named, but the target is clear: a uranium plant in a GPS-jammed valley, surrounded by surface-to-air missiles and fifth-gen fighters. In real life, Fordow sits in a mountainous fortress, shielded by SAM batteries, jamming tech, and hardened bunkers. In the film: three weeks become ten days become go-time. In reality: intel warned that Iran's enrichment programme was just days from a critical threshold. And in both cases, the justification was identical: not America-first, but ally-defence. In Maverick, it's the vague protection of "our friends in the region." In 2025, Trump didn't even bother with euphemism—Israel was the subtext and subtext became text. It wasn't a shot-for-shot remake. But it was close enough to make even Cruise raise an eyebrow behind his aviators. Whose War Is It Anyway? What made Maverick eerie in hindsight was how little it bothered to justify the mission. No American hostages. No nukes pointed at New York. Just an unspoken understanding that someone else's red line was worth flying into. And that's what the Right is now debating. Why should American pilots risk their lives for foreign bunkers? Why should billion-dollar aircraft be dispatched to send messages on behalf of another democracy? Maverick doesn't ask "why." It only asks: "Can it be done?" That question, in 2025, is no longer rhetorical. The Real Finale: A Flag, a Flyby… and a Fade to Black Maverick ends like every great American military fantasy: mission accomplished, uranium plant obliterated, and Tom Cruise strutting across the tarmac with his abs and aircraft intact. The jets land. The music swells. The flag flutters in cinematic slow motion. It could have been lifted straight from the closing scene of Operation Midnight Hammer. But imagine for a second that Maverick didn't make it. That he was shot down in that snowy canyon, dying for a target that never threatened his home, buried in a country he couldn't name, on a mission no one would claim. Would the audience still cheer? Would they even remember who the war was for? This is the question now circling Washington like an unarmed drone—silent, discomfiting, and impossible to shoot down. When the justification for war is wrapped in vagueness, when the enemy is unnamed, and when "defending our allies" becomes the only plotline—how long before audiences, and voters, stop watching the show? After all, wasn't this the very premise Trump once campaigned against? That MAGA would not behave like Bush-era neocons salivating for another war? That America's sons and daughters would no longer be deployed as global hall monitors in faraway deserts? Only last month in Saudi Arabia, Trump, trying to draw a red line between himself and Dubya, declared: 'In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. ' As David Remnick pointed out in a recent piece in New Yorker , Trump once echoed Bannon and Tucker Carlson when he said: 'In recent years, far too many American Presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.' Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Dagger Attack Scene And yet, here we are—seven stealth bombers later. A highly classified mission. A decoy formation. A multi-theatre deployment. A strike not to defend American cities, but to send a message on behalf of regional allies. It may have looked like surgical precision from the skies—but on the ground, it's a policy contradiction wrapped in cinematic déjà vu. Even the bill Trump signed to fund the strike—what he called a 'big, beautiful defence package'—flies in the face of MAGA's small-government gospel. This wasn't lean governance. It was big-budget interventionism, scored by swelling violins and paid for with a trillion-dollar cheque. It ignited a backlash from his base—and a very public falling out with Elon Musk, who accused Trump of abandoning fiscal discipline for Pentagon theatrics. Because it didn't start with a movie. It started with a massacre. On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters paraglided into southern Israel, launching the deadliest attack in the country's history. That single morning shattered illusions across the region. It led to a brutal war in Gaza. It provoked the Houthis to enter the fray. It drew Hezbollah closer to the edge. And it hardened Israel's posture, setting off a chain reaction that eventually led the US to launch Operation Midnight Hammer. From beach football to bunker busters, from afterburners to actual airstrikes—Top Gun began as propaganda. Maverick upgraded it into spectacle. And Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer may be the moment the reel became real. The movie always had the jets. Reality just pressed play. And if that doesn't make you pause—even if you're wearing aviators—just remember: Not even Tom Cruise can outrun a B-2 bomber. Though, to be fair, he'd probably try. On foot. While dangling off a missile. Smiling. As for the true MAGA believers—those who rallied behind promises of no more endless wars and a return to fiscal sanity—they're left asking the same question Maverick once did: Whose mission was this anyway?
Time of India
4 days ago
- Time of India
Tom Cruise to Receive First-Ever Honorary Oscar at 2025 Governors Awards
Hollywood legend Tom Cruise will be honoured with his first-ever Honorary Oscar at the 16th Annual Governors Awards on November 16, 2025. Known for redefining the action genre with his dedication to stunts, cinema, and the theatrical experience, Cruise is being celebrated for his decades-long impact on President Janet Yang called him 'an inspiration to all.' The same event will also honour Debbie Allen, Wynn Thomas, and Dolly Parton, making this one of the most iconic Governors Awards lineups in recent years. Cruise's upcoming release, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, is already generating massive buzz. Read More
