The last two installments of Mission: Impossible already had an extra sense of weightage. Previously titled “Dead Reckoning – Part 2” (2025), it would later be retitled as the “Final Reckoning”, due to director and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, screenwriter Erik Jendersen and of course star Tom Cruise’s attempt to encapsulate thirty years of this franchise by connecting all the films (almost all of them) and provide a suitable coda. Needless to say, it is a ton and a half both in terms of runtime and ambition, and thus majorly flawed, but no less enjoyable.
Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
What was the Entity?
Two months after the events of “Dead Reckoning,” with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) having hoodwinked Gabriel (Esai Morales) and stolen the Cruciform Key, the IMF team find themselves in a world utterly under the mercy of the Entity, which manipulates the news and social media and produces a gyre between truth and reality that also produces fanatic followers who treat the Entity’s words as gospel. US President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) urges Ethan to surrender with the Cruciform Key, as that unlocks the Entity’s source code stored within the sonarosphere of the sunken submarine Sevastopol.
Hunt reunites with Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who takes him to a hidden safe house within the tunnels of London where Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) recovers from a terminal illness. Stickell, though, in traditional Phineas Freak form, has managed to build his magnum opus – a plug-and-play circuit called a poison pill, that when attached to the Podkova, which houses the source code, will be able to neutralize the Entity. But the plan requires them to search for Sevastopol, for which the guys resolve to find Gabriel. They first free Gabriel’s assistant and assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), who had betrayed him in the previous film, and when finding themselves at a standoff, manage to convince and recruit CIA operative Degas (Gregg Tarzan Davis) to their cause.
At a US Embassy function in London, where Gabriel is expected to be present, Hunt is reunited with Grace (Hayley Atwell), who is now working for Kittridge and has been instructed to bring him in. Instead, Grace defies orders to aid Ethan. Unfortunately, both of them are captured by Gabriel. While torturing them at a hidden bunker, Gabriel reveals how Ethan had been unwittingly responsible for the creation of the Entity. To rescue his wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), Ethan had to steal the mysterious weapon termed the “rabbit’s foot” from a vault in Shanghai for gangster Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). (The events of Mission: Impossible 3).
Gabriel reveals that the prototype housed within the Rabbit’s foot was the first iteration of the Artificial Intelligence that would be experimented on and would reiterate to form the Entity and escape from the housing within the Sevastopol. Hunt would try to bluff Gabriel by poisoning himself with a cyanide pill, and as Gabriel’s goons move to check on him, Hunt kills them with impunity. But Gabriel has escaped, and unfortunately for Hunt, Gabriel is now the “jilted lover” of the Entity owing to his failure in the previous film. He is now going to try to take the Poison Pill from Luther and neutralize the Entity so that he can be the one in control.
As the rest of the team converges at the location, Ethan finds a massive trunk housing a form of hyperbaric chamber with a face mask that had enabled Gabriel to communicate with the Entity. Throwing caution to the wind, Ethan puts the mask on and starts to communicate, during which the Entity reveals his true plans—to seize control of the world’s nuclear arsenals within four days and complete its apotheosis.
Armed with that knowledge and realising that to escape the Entity’s forethought would entail taking himself out of the equation, he uses the flashes of his visions to instruct Benji to take leadership of the team and search for something called SOSUS, and try to attempt with Hunt in cycles of 15 minutes over 2 hours until Hunt responds, after which they would have to rescue him with a makeshift decompression chamber.
Does Ethan manage to save Luther?
Handing over leadership duties to Benji frees Ethan up to run helter-skelter to their safe house, but he would be too late. By the time Ethan arrives, Gabriel has already taken the poison pill and imprisons Luther with a massive nuclear bomb about to blow. Luther begins to remove one of the detonators from the bomb so that he can minimize the fallout from the explosion and restrict it underground. There was only enough time for Ethan to say a final goodbye to Luther before running away as the explosion destroyed the bunker, killing Luther with it.
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To whom does Ethan surrender?
As Hunt barely manages to walk away from the debris, he is arrested by CIA operative Jasper Briggs, a partner of Degas who is currently working for the IMF. Hunt would be transported to the Mount Weather Facility. En route to that location, Briggs is slightly flabbergasted when Hunt reveals his knowledge about Briggs being a nom de guerre – his true name is Jim Phelps Jr., the son of Ethan’s former boss Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), who had betrayed Ethan and killed the IMF team in the events of “Mission: Impossible.” Phelps’ morality being what it is, he is still miffed at Ethan for being indirectly responsible for Phelps’ name being dragged through the mud, and thus refuses to work together with Hunt even during this crisis period.
At Mount Weather, Hunt outlines his wild plan to President Sloane and the Cabinet of Security Chiefs, which would entail taking the assistance of USS George HW Bush, currently at a standoff at the Bering Sea with the Russian Forces. Hunt’s plan is to convince the aircraft carrier to aid him in searching for the Sevastopol wreck, and in doing so, use the Entity source code from the Sevastopol to destroy the Entity rather than attempt to control it.
While Sloane’s team, including Kittridge, isn’t keen on Hunt operating independently to search for the Sevastopol, Sloane secretly authorises Hunt’s plan, letting him fly to the USS George Hw Bush carrier, whereby Hunt uses Sloane’s message to Admiral Neely (Hannah Waddingham) – hinting at a shared traumatic past between them – to convince her to aid Hunt in his plans.
What happens in Blesdoe’s submarine?
Neely, realizing that any wrong move could be read as an act of aggression by the Russians, assigns him to Commander Blesdoe’s (Trammell Tillman) submarine, the USS Ohio, which would only swim to Periscope depth for five minutes. Realizing that time is running out, Hunt recklessly jumps into the freezing water and is rescued at the last second by divers. Once rescued, Hunt outlines his plan: to be trained and retrofitted by Blesdoe’s team with decompression chamber suits and be warned about the perils of being present below 500 ft, as Hunt’s mind would be beset by hallucinations due to undersea pressure.
A different sort of pressure would plague Hunt in the submarine, where one zealot would attack him while he would be exercising on the treadmill. The fight, which Ethan wins with some struggle and some last-minute aid, does remind him of time running out, and not a moment too soon. After all, the president and her cabinet of chiefs of secret services are slowly losing their composure as the entity moves forward and hacks through almost all the countries’ nuclear arsenal, bringing it to their control, leading to Sloane fearing to take the drastic measures she had been avoiding.
How does Donloe help Benji and his team?
Meanwhile, Benji’s IMF squad would find themselves at St. Matthews Island, to investigate one of the SOSUS (sound surveillance system) stations and track Sevastopol’s location and ping that within an interval of 15 minutes, with the hopes of Ethan having picked the location up. Upon reaching there, Benji is shocked to discover William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), ex-CIA Analyst and the unwitting victim of Ethan Hunt’s machinations to steal an NOC list (events of the first film).
Donloe, after being banished to maintain this SOSUS station, has made a life here, having married a local woman and recording findings of the SOSUS stations on floppy disks. However, Donloe is restricted from helping the team due to the presence of unwelcome Russians, who surprisingly also have a fully conjoined Cruciform Key, but they don’t have the location.
While held hostage by the Russians, Donloe reveals that the stack of disks strewn around Donloe’s house in boxes is empty. agents, led by Denlinger (Cary Elwes), appeared at his doorstep, marking the point when serious research into the AI finally began. But Donloe also reveals that he had memorized the coordinates. As Paris and Degas spring an attack on the Russians, Grace and Donloe’s wife Tapeesa take the makeshift decompression chamber and begin their arduous journey along the ice. While the house is almost being destroyed, Donloe manages to send the coordinates to the USS Ohio in the nick of time.
It does help Ethan to find the location, reversing the coordinates sent by Donloe to locate Sevastopol. The journey from Ohio’s belly to the sonarosphere within the Sevastopol’s belly is one arduous journey, with Ethan coming close to death, and almost dying, having removed his diving gear as he takes the Podkova out of the Sevastopol and floats up to the icy surface. Life rejoins his side with the ice breaking, Grace pulling him out of the ice and resuscitating him within the decompression chamber.
What was the plan to trap the Entity?
With time running out, Sloane finds herself having to make a hard decision, with the nuclear centres systematically being controlled by the Entity. The Entity, though, to protect itself from the Nuclear fallout, plans to store itself within the Doomsday Vault in South Africa. Ethan’s plan, as outlined by Benji, is to essentially stop the Entity from uploading itself to the cloud. The combination of the Podkova and the poison pill would allow the Entity to be uploaded to the server. The Poison Pill essentially aids in acting as a digital toxin, allowing the Entity to believe it is being uploaded to the Doomsday Vault, but in reality, it would be uploaded to an Optical 5D drive, created by Luther, that would be successful in trapping the Entity.
The Optical drive needs to be connected to the server, and once the entity believes it has reached the server, it will try to initiate the nuclear launch. From the time the poison pill is connected to the time it reaches the optical data drive to the Entity’s launching, Grace will have roughly 100 ms to disconnect the drive. If she does it too soon, the entity won’t be trapped in the 5D drive but would spread itself in the Doomsday Vault and be protected. If they do it too late, the same thing would occur, except the nuclear missiles would also be launched, essentially destroying the world.
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How do things go wrong at the Doomsday Vault?
Things go wrong because it is a Mission: Impossible movie, so of course they do. The IMF team, including Donloe and his wife, enters the Doomsday Vault to negotiate or kill Gabriel and attempt to take the Poison Pill from him. However, the playing field would be skewed because Hunt finds Gabriel prepared for him, with another bomb of thirty megaton yield and one of his henchmen having his finger pressed against the detonator. His plan is to destroy the entity within the bunker; he relies on the Entity’s self-preservation to ensure it enters the vault, which could only happen if Hunt gives Gabriel the Podkova.
While the vault is destroyed, Gabriel escapes with an old analogue plane. But while Hunt and Gabriel are combating with their words, Kittridge and Briggs appear to throw a wrench into their plan and order Hunt to give them the Source Code so that they can control the Entity. As with most of these high-pressure scenarios, a confrontation ensues, and the bomb’s countdown begins. Benji gets shot but doesn’t inform Ethan, instead reassuring him to chase Gabriel down, while he tries to enter the Vault and stop the Entity from uploading. Briggs and Kittridge, meanwhile, attempt to follow Hunt.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Did the IMF team succeed in trapping the Entity?
The IMF team split up into groups of three. Ethan, being the lone warrior, chasing after Gabriel, has to jump on a biplane, fight off the henchmen, and follow him in pursuit. Meanwhile, Donloe, Tapeesa, and Degas stay outside the vault, with Donloe opening and slowly disconnecting the detonators one at a time to give the team within the vault 10 minutes of extra time for every detonator being disconnected.
Finally, the third team of Grace, Paris, and Benji was barely smuggled into the vault. Paris uses a pen to operate and make a hole for air to pass through and stop fluid from entering Benji’s pleural cavity (all under Benji’s instruction). Benji would also instruct Grace to hack into the server and shut off the switch of the internal network of the server, all in an effort to let the Entity in and trap it in the drive.
Meanwhile, Ethan, manages to manoeuvre his biplane and reach Gabriel’s biplane, and the resulting aerial struggle almost makes Ethan fall off the plane and leads to Gabriel’s grisly death after Ethan manages to throw him off his seat and take the poison pill, Ethan begins to connect the poison pill and the Podkova mid-air, while escaping from the plane in a parachute that burns out, and struggling to produce a backup parachute. Meanwhile, at the vault, Grace and Paris attempt to keep Benji from losing consciousness so that Benji can instruct Grace on the specific sequence to cut the wires and connect them to the receiver hub that houses the 5D Optical drive. Once the receiver is activated, she throws the switch back on.
Sloane and his advisors had planned to launch their nuclear missiles at the entity-infected countries, but to maintain diplomatic equality, they had also planned to destroy one of the lesser inhabited cities within the United States, as a show of solidarity. It was a foolish idea, and the President thinks it is morally repugnant, but the decision and moral dilemma are taken out of her hands when one of the security personnel attempts to shoot the President and kills General Sidney, who had jumped to protect her. The resultant confusion distracted them enough for the Entity to hack and take control of their nuclear missiles.
As Ethan falls to his apparent death, the green light of the receiver turns on, Grace cuts the wire to let the Entity into the Optical 5D drive, and not a moment too soon, disconnects it. The world’s power grid turns off as the nuclear arsenals are deactivated due to the Entity being disconnected from the network, while the bomb outside the vault goes off, but the trio of Donloe, Tapeesa, and Degas have time to rush inside the vault and get in.
As the movie reaches its end, we see Ethan Hunt having survived, and the poison pill housing a recording of Luther playing, thanking Ethan, and reminding him that he never had a doubt. Luther also urges him to consider that this life of Ethan Hunt hadn’t been a quirk of fate, but his true calling, and that the world is safe primarily because of Ethan’s trust in humanity and his team. It’s a similar sentiment President Erika Sloane had as well, who had in the last second decided to disarm the nuclear missiles. Meanwhile, Kittridge and Briggs, AKA Phelps, catch up with Hunt, with Kittridge lamenting the loss of the Podkova and the Entity, while Phelps abstains from shooting Hunt and instead makes peace with him.
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” (2025) ends with the team re-forming in London for one last time, with Grace handing the Optical 5D Drive housing the Entity to Ethan, as she had foretold before. The team looks on at the world unaware of how they had been saved, before the team members go their separate ways.
