I watched The Final Reckoning the other day, and I kind of regret not spending those three hours doing literally anything else. This is coming from someone who genuinely loves watching Tom Cruise risk his life for our entertainment.

Let me start with what didn't make me want to turn it off. The submarine sequence is genuinely intense, even on a smaller screen. And that biplane chase everyone talks about? Absolutely insane.

Tramell Tillman shows up and immediately makes me wish the entire movie was about his submarine captain character instead. The guy has more screen presence in ten minutes than most of the main cast manages in three hours. Angela Bassett as the President brings actual gravitas to her scenes, which is impressive considering she's mostly reacting to exposition about an evil AI.

ze problems

This movie spends an ungodly amount of time explaining things I either already knew or didn't need to know. I'm not kidding -- there are flashbacks to flashbacks. The first half is basically a PowerPoint presentation about the previous seven movies. The pacing is genuinely broken. When you're watching at home and you keep checking how much time is left, something has gone very wrong.

Remember when MI villains were actual people you could understand? Now we have an AI that's supposedly going to end the world, but mostly just makes people stand around having very serious conversations about how dangerous it is. Gabriel, who was quite menacing in Dead Reckoning, feels like he's phoning it in from his trailer. It's like they took everything scary about him and replaced it with generic "I am evil" dialogue.

Plus a main character's death feels like cheap emotional manipulation, especially when they reveal he was already dying anyway. It's both tragic and pointless simultaneously.

ze bottom line

The Final Reckoning feels like a movie that's more interested in being the conclusion to something than being good on its own. It's so busy wrapping up plot threads and explaining callbacks that it forgets to create new memorable moments. By the time we get to the genuinely good action stuff, I was already mentally checked out from an hour of exposition dumps. This was supposed to be Tom Cruise's big farewell as Ethan Hunt, but instead of going out with a bang, it ends with a very expensive, very long lecture about why the franchise was great. If this really is the final mission, it's not the send-off we deserved.