LOS ANGELES, May 14 (UPI) -- Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, in theaters May 23, delivers on the level of the franchise's most recent films once it gets going. It does, however, have the slowest start of all eight Mission: Impossible movies.
In 2023's Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) took on the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) to retrieve the key that unlocks the source code of the rogue artificial intelligence known as The Entity. Final Reckoning opens two months later, with Ethan unsure what to do with such power.
As The Entity holds hostage all of cyberspace and the world's electronics, including military weapons, there is a deadline before the AI will control the world. That is, if Ethan doesn't stop it first.
The plan to destroy The Entity requires Ethan's teammates, hackers Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Gabriel's turncoat assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff). The mission is complicated by U.S. President Sloane (Angela Bassett) sending agents to recover The Entity's controls for U.S. purposes, which Ethan knows will backfire.
The missions live up to the movie's title by devising ways to keep making the task harder for Ethan. For example, he's already diving to crushing depths to activate computers in a sunken submarine when the sub rolls towards an abyss.
