Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025)“We are now in the reality of the Entity.” This is the warning intoned several times in the latest installment of the Mission: Impossible series, The Final Reckoning. In contrast, The Final Reckoning celebrates the tenacity and power of the human body struggling against technology. In the first entry in the film franchise, Mission: Impossible (1996), Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt hung upside-down from an air duct in a maximum-security vault while attempting to transfer data onto a floppy disk. The recent Mission: Impossible films root dramatic action in a physicality that makes the viewer’s muscles tighten or their skin creep. Actor-producer Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (who has helmed the last four Mission: Impossible entries, starting with 2015’s Rogue Nation) know they belong to this tradition.