Mission: Impossible: – The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise’s latest edition of the M:I franchise, launched Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cruise was present in for the screening alongside director Christopher McQuarrie and co-stars Hayley Atwell, Angela Bassett, Hannah Waddingham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, Esai Morales, and Tramell Tillman. 

Picking up from Dead Reckoning Part One, the film follows Cruise’s Ethan Hunt who now holds the key to confronting the formidable AI known as the Entity, his most perilous adversary yet. He must gather his team to locate the sunken Russian submarine containing the Entity’s source code, the key to its destruction.

Deadline’s Damon Wise, in his review, said the pic “holds up as a stand-alone feature” despite being the eighth edition in a decades-long franchise. 

“The callbacks and in-jokes require a fair bit of knowledge, since they span the franchise’s whole lifetime in unexpected ways, but it’s pretty easy to pick up all the jigsaw pieces and, when it really gets going, immediately forget all about them,” Wise wrote. 

Wise also questioned whether Cruise, now 62 years old, might return for another Mission film: “As Cruise breezes into his mid-60s, it’s hard to imagine him pulling off anything like the high-wire act he achieves here. But the door is still open, and the challenge is there, should anyone else choose to accept it.” 

In a five-star review, The Telegraph newspaper states that with The Final Reckoning, Cruise “pulls off his most deranged stunt yet.” 

“This dazzlingly ambitious finale sees Ethan Hunt take on a challenge of biblical proportions – and he doesn’t let us down,” the review read. The UK’s Guardian also gave it five stars, calling it “a wildly entertaining adventure.”

Empire magazine described the film as “vast” in scale and full of “tense, dense, and stressful” sequences. The magazine also questioned whether this is Cruise’s final appearance as Hunt. 

“If this is indeed his final mission, it’s quite the appropriate swansong — but let’s hope the door will stay open, should he once again choose to accept,” Empire’s review read. 

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times described The Final Reckoning as an “enjoyably unhinged follow-up” to 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One. Dargis describes McQuarrie’s direction as “well-oiled and smoothly running.”

Indiewire, however, was skeptical of the film’s efficiency. In a review titled Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ Review: Hollywood’s Greatest Action Franchise Saves the Worst for Last, David Ehrlich writes: “The Final Reckoning is framed as a consequence of the choices that Ethan has made in the past, and while that approach results in two of the cleverest ret-cons in blockbuster history (both of which do a silly but satisfying job of tying the whole franchise together), it has the unfortunate side effect of forcing the film to haltingly dramatize — and thereby diminish — the same tensions that Tom Cruise has latently seeded into every stunt, sprint, and hard stare over the course of the previous seven movies.”

Vulture called the film “a mess…but a fun mess”, while Entertainment Weekly was also puzzled by the film, calling it “equally baffling and awesome”. Discussing Film also had reservations, describing it as “a messy finale that sadly doesn’t reach the previous heights of the franchise”.

The film received a 7½-minute ovation this evening in Cannes. Paramount Pictures will launch the film stateside May 23 in theaters, Dolby Cinema, 4DX, ScreenX, premium large formats, and Imax.