‘Mission: Impossible’ Recap: Everything You Need to Remember Before ‘The Final Reckoning’

One of the most fun byproducts of the success of the “Mission: Impossible” series is that the labyrinthine logic of the films works equally well as meticulously orchestrated world-building and complete happenstance. There’s plenty of evidence if you want to see in the overall franchise an interconnected sequence of events, and yet it’s just as easy to drop into individual chapters (and out of others) without losing your mooring as a viewer.

That said, co-writer and director Christopher McQuarrie may have slightly overextended himself with what is meant to be the epic finale for the saga of the man called Ethan Hunt: not long after the release of the 2023 installment “Dead Reckoning — Part One,” he and distributor Paramount Pictures effectively dropped the “Part One” and dubbed its follow-up “The Final Reckoning.” As potential viewers can imagine, there’s still plenty of connective tissue between the two films, and in fact reaches back across the whole series to retroactively assign it more stakes — yes, even deadlier than the world-ending catastrophes that drove each adventure. Consequently, ahead of its May 23 opening day, Variety has assembled a primer to loop audiences in and catch them up on the franchise ahead of that “Final Reckoning.”

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Where did the series leave off last time?

In “Dead Reckoning,” Ethan Hunt comes face to face with Gabriel Martinelli (Esai Morales), a black-ops mover and shaker tied to the incident that first prompted him to join the Impossible Mission Force. Gabriel is the human instrument of The Entity, an advanced form of artificial intelligence that has slowly been infiltrating world powers as in order to destabilize the flow of information.

After a confrontation atop a speeding train, Gabriel escapes capture and continues his plan to assist the Entity, although Ethan was able to recover the key. Further, Ethan and his team learn from Gabriel’s associate Paris (Pom Klementieff) that the two-piece cruciform key they’ve been chasing unlocks a chamber (the “sonar sphere”) in the hull of a sunken Russian submarine, the Sevastapol, carrying the source code for the Entity. Now possessing the literal key to control or kill their AI adversary, the IMF team continues to work as disavowed agents to locate the Sevastapol, which is buried at the bottom of the ocean at a location currently known to no one.

Who now makes up Ethan’s team?

Aside from the death-defying man himself, described in “Dead Reckoning” as a “mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos,” the IMF team includes computer-hacking “guy in the van” Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), reluctant field agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and new recruit Grace (Hayley Atwell), the latter of whom Ethan chased through the previous film. Joining them is Paris, Gabriel’s former henchwoman who survived her boss’ attempt to murder her, and Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), a U.S. intelligence agent who previously served as the partner of Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham), who began chasing Ethan in “Dead Reckoning.”

Who’s watching this unfold on the world stage?

At the top of the pyramid, there’s President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), formerly the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She is advised by Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), the current CIA director who previously served as the director of the IMF — and who maintains a tenuous relationship with Ethan after they clashed 30 years ago. She’s further surrounded by Secretary of Defense Serling Bernstein (Holt McCallany), Secretary of State Walters (Janet McTeer), General Sidmey (Nick Offerman), who’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NSA head Angstrom (Mark Gatiss) and director of National Intelligence Richards (Charles Parnell).

Which other previous installments does “The Final Reckoning” link back to?

Several, starting with “Mission: Impossible” (1996). It’s during Ethan’s first big mission that he directly encounters Kittridge, and the two of them maintain a similar kind of the prickly chemistry they first developed back then. That said, they mutually recognize the good intentions of the other, even if they don’t always agree upon the method by which each achieves them.

Also in the first film, Ethan infiltrates a secure vault at CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, which was supposed to be monitored by William Donloe (Rolf Saxon). As a result of Donloe’s failure, he was reassigned to a remote outpost in Alaska. In the team’s search for the Sevastapol, Ethan crosses paths with Donloe after decades, and face-to-face for the first time.

“Mission: Impossible III” is also relevant, though largely in retrospect. In that film, Ethan is chasing after a mysterious device known as the “Rabbit’s Foot,” described by Benji as “the anti-God” and an agent of chaos but whose actual purpose is never revealed. Though never mentioned again it figures into the history of the artificial intelligence that evolved into the Entity.

Otherwise, the terrorist people or organizations from the previous films — Cobalt in “Ghost Protocol” (2011), the Syndicate in “Rogue Nation” (2015) and The Apostles in “Fallout” (2018) don’t strictly connect to Gabriel or the Entity but they were distantly fueled by the latter’s infiltration of worldwide intelligence agencies.

What else should you know going in?

For better or worse, “The Final Reckoning” front-loads almost all of this information into the film, either as (lengthy) expository voiceover or via early discussions between the characters. Though it wraps the franchise, the film is meant to almost single-mindedly resolve the build-up that occurred in “Dead Reckoning” and so most of the minutiae listed above exists for longtime fans rather than as required knowledge to understand what’s happening (i.e., Tom Cruise risking life and limb for the audience’s entertainment). Either way, feel comfortable going to see this without crib notes in hand — the movie will get you up to speed, whether or not you’ve accepted this mission since the very beginning of the franchise.