Mission: Impossible 8 Reviews Praise Tom Cruise Despite ‘Flat-Out Ridiculous’ and ‘Disjointed’ Story

NEED TO KNOW

• Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, starring Tom Cruise, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14
• Critics writing the movie’s first reviews were torn, both praising Cruise’s stunts while also questioning its talky sequences
• The eighth Mission: Impossible is in theaters May 23

The first reviews for Tom Cruise's latest Mission: Impossible flick are in — featuring admiration for its daring stunts and some criticism for everything else.

Critics at the Wednesday, May 14, Cannes Film Festival premiere of the action franchise's eighth installment, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, weighed in on the Christopher McQuarrie-directed sequel ahead of its May 23 theatrical release. Many pointed out its almost-three-hour runtime, painting it as a talky and dour story compared to its predecessors.

"Two extended stunt sequences in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning are as bold and original as anything seen in the enduring spy franchise’s almost three-decade history,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney of a scene in which Cruise tumbles inside a submarine filling with water, and another where he crawls onto the wings of flying biplanes.

“Cruise’s commitment to performing his own stunts and giving audiences the analog thrill of in-camera daredevilry instead of digital fakery has progressed to ever more astonishing feats,” he added. However, “We have to wait out roughly half the almost three-hour movie for much of the exhilarating action and fabulous locations that are the series’ lifeblood.”

Often “dour and heavy,” continued Rooney, the movie features a “maddeningly convoluted and, well, silly” story buoyed by Cruise’s performance as super spy Ethan Hunt. “It’s a disappointing farewell with a handful of high points courtesy of the indefatigable lead actor.”

Fionnuala Halligan of Screen Daily agreed, writing that the movie “delivers ever more thrills and spills, even though the links between the action are ever more frayed.” She states that the film's fights and stunts “are superb feats,” but given the overuse of self-referential flashbacks to previous Mission moments, it’s “lost for the first third in its own lore.”

That was an issue as well for IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, who, under a headline asserting that Final Reckoning “saves the worst for last,” called it “a dull and disjointed anticlimax” with a “bizarrely joyless story.” He goes on to describe the movie’s villainous artificial intelligence, introduced in 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One, as a "crisis" unfolding “across a ploddingly scripted boardroom drama.”

Cruise’s wild stunt sequences are “still mind-boggling,” he concluded, “even if this movie desperately needed more of them… The longest Mission: Impossible movie ever has, by far, the least action to offer in return.”

Nicholas Barber of the BBC did not mince words, dubbing McQuarrie’s flick “the feel-bad film of the summer” with a “solemn” and “silly” devotion to darkness. “The Final Reckoning, set almost entirely in tunnels and caverns, and in the depths of the ocean, is the dullest and darkest film in the series, both literally and figuratively.”

He added, “It devotes an inordinate amount of its almost-three-hour running time to scenes of people sitting in shadowy rooms, explaining the story to each other in gravelly whispers. Again and again, we have to sit through these ponderous, portentous mutterings: the title might as well have been Exposition: Interminable.”

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, however, “enjoyed it thoroughly, despite its clichés, extravagant violence and gung-ho militarism.” She adds that the use of flashbacks “strengthen the franchise’s continuity, and also have a distinctly self-congratulatory cast to them. They remind you that Cruise has had serious (bruised, battered) skin in the game from the beginning.”

Praising many of the performances, she highlighted that the new movie is “enjoyably unhinged” and “flat-out ridiculous.”

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in theaters May 23. For more on the franchise, including exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes photos, PEOPLE’s special edition is out now.