Monday new releases: 19 May 2025

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Final Destination Bloodlines, The Salt Path and La Cocina are in cinemas and Nonnas is streaming on Netflix.

One can’t help feeling that the title change from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a bit like those documents you work on that end up being called “Important Film Review 250519 - FINAL-FINAL this time - no more edits” but still has to get that last sign-off from the boss. The boss in this case being Tom Cruise.

In the opening credits, the film is called “A Tom Cruise Production” and I don’t recall previous episodes being quite so closely aligned to its star. It’s an appropriate credit, though, because the subtext throughout is about how there is no one alive like Cruise and we’re going to prove it to you.

I’ve seen the word Messianic used about the closing chapter of this Mission: Impossible arc. We’re told (often) that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is the only person who can save the world from the rogue A.I. known as The Entity and that we need to trust him – have faith in him – one last time. He even dies and is resurrected.

The problem with putting our faith so squarely in Mr. Cruise is that Hunt is now so far from being a character we can identify with that there’s nothing there for an audience to feel. I appreciated the extraordinary set-pieces and enjoyed the superb craftsmanship, but all that happened for me was that I was entertained. It meant nothing to me. The flat ending – the absence of emotional or celebratory release – didn’t help.

Another problem the film has in engaging us in anything deeper is that “The Entity” isn’t a character, as such. We have to be told what it wants – over and over again – and that its endgame feels like a 1980s Cold War retread. Nuclear weapons in bunkers, a digitally enhanced global annihilation fantasy.

What The Final Reckoning does exceptionally well – it’s in the franchise’s DNA after all – are ticking clocks and countdowns. Director Christopher McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton ensure that each of those spectacular set-pieces are (literally) gripping – the editor-in-chief and I still hold hands in the movies and it took me a few minutes to get the blood circulating once again when the lights went up.

The staging of multiple action scenes in parallel also works brilliantly well. Shots match from submarine to Arctic cabin and back again, but they also know when we need to linger. Cruise’s battle against the dead Russian submarine that’s determined to thwart his efforts at escape is a superbly realised tour-de-force.

The best thing I can say about Final Destination Bloodlines – this franchise has as confusing an attitude to punctuation as Mission: Impossible and, like many of its characters, is missing a colon – the best thing I can say is that I survived it.