Yours portly ventured to his local cinema last week. One of the glories of summer vacation is that I can go see the movies at 11:40 AM on a Thursday morning, which is exactly what I did when I went to see Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025).
Why such an early showing? Well, the movie—and this point is my chief complaint about it—is nearly three hours long. Like every major film release these days, directors seem incapable of shooting and editing a film that is under two hours. A small handful of super long films don’t feel long, and I welcome their three-hour runtimes, but those (like Goodfellas [1990]) are very much the exception to the rule. What happened to the tight, 90-minute flick?
M:ITFR gets a bit of a pass because it is the final (allegedly) film in a franchise that dates back to 1996. Think about that—this franchise pre-dates the birth of Dr. Fiancée by two years. I was eleven when the first film released; I’m forty now. It is a testament to Tom Cruise‘s longevity, dedication, and fitness that he was able to play Ethan Hunt for so nearly thirty years. Cruise famously and frequently performs his own stunts; seeing a man of his age (he’s 62; he’ll turn 63 in July) perform them is impressive.
The flick was filmed back-to-back with its predecessor, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), but the writers’ strike delayed production of M:ITFR until 2024. That means Cruise played Ethan Hunt for twenty-eight years—dang!
But I digress. Is the impossible length of this film worth accepting the mission?
The Portly Politico 