The New Yorker:

The eighth (and perhaps the last) installment in the epochal Tom Cruise vehicle suffers from self-indulgent gravitas, but the best sequences are a model of action cinema at its purest.

By Justin Chang

“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” has a running time of just under three hours. Within those three hours, alas, I’d say that Tom Cruise has a running time of only a minute or two. For those of us who’ve grown fond of Cruise the cardio demon, this is dispiriting news: what a letdown after “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol” (2011), in which he raced heroically through the blinding fury of a Dubai sandstorm. And who could forget the blissful London chase sequence from “Mission: Impossible—Fallout” (2018), in which Cruise spent a whole seven minutes tearing up the geometric staircase at St. Paul’s, then sprinting, like an unusually stiff-backed cheetah, across one rooftop after another?

Cruise does go for another brisk London jog in “The Final Reckoning,” and, although he’s had tougher workouts, he seems intent, as ever, on outrunning time itself—an idea literalized by the sight of Big Ben glowing in the distance, ticking away the seconds until doomsday. Cruise’s character, the Impossible Mission Force agent extraordinaire Ethan Hunt, has a bomb that needs defusing; a beloved teammate, Luther (Ving Rhames), who needs rescuing; and an artificially intelligent nemesis, the Entity, to banish to the pits of cyberhell. But for Cruise the actor, who turns sixty-three in July, running has become more than a means to a narrative end. He does it for the same reasons he scales skyscrapers, plunges into watery depths, and dangles from renegade aircraft: to cast aside any hint of creeping senescence, and to remind us what an honest-to-God movie star is willing to risk for our entertainment. And that means something in a Hollywood that now caters to puny screens and punier visions, outsourcing the finer mechanics of action filmmaking to the visual-effects department. (Is it any wonder that A.I. is this movie’s supervillain?) Cruise means to turn back the clock in more than one sense. He may be older and puffier around the eyes than in 1996, when the first “Mission: Impossible” film was released. But he still dives headlong into each adventure as if it were his personal fountain of youth.

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