“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” was a bit of a disappointment. As Chris Evangelista put it in his /Film review, the film felt like it was “cobbled together in between big set pieces.” Its biggest sin (other than killing off a certain fan-favorite character) was making the story come across as barely stitched together between set pieces, which is never a good sign.

Now, whether it is the actual final film in the franchise or not, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” is at the very least a movie with higher stakes than any “Mission: Impossible” movie before it. In case you need a reminder, “Dead Reckoning” ended on a big cliffhanger. The human villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) got away, leaving Ethan Hunt and his team scrambling and on a race against the clock to find a sunken submarine and use a mysterious and convoluted key to stop the evil A.I. known as the Entity from destroying the world.

The new Super Bowl trailer for “Mission Impossible — The Final Reckoning” promises a nostalgic finale tying together threads from as far back as the very first “Mission: Impossible.” We saw the return of Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge, as well as Rolf Saxon’s William Donloe, in “Dead Reckoning.” Now, “The Final Reckoning” is bringing back Angela Bassett as CIA director Erika Sloane last seen in “Fallout.” Most intriguing, however, is the return of the biological weapon known as the Rabbit’s Foot from “Mission: Impossible III.”

We don’t know whether “The Final Reckoning” is going to be Tom Cruise’s final round as Ethan Hunt, or if he’ll make good on his promise (threat?) to continue playing the character for decades to come until audiences get bored. What we can tell is that “The Final Reckoning” is not pulling any punches. It is clear that the members of the Impossible Mission Force are in actual mortal danger this time and they might not all make it out.

In that regard, it did help to split the story in two parts, because we have already spent a whole movie seeing how the Entity toys around the IMF and show them that the AI is in a whole other league. This is a different kind of villain than anything we’ve seen in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise before. In the first film, it doesn’t seem to have a clear motive or goal. But now that it’s become clear the fate of humanity is at stake, it seems the evil A.I. doesn’t just want to be left alone, but is now on the offensive. It has moved from Mewtwo in “Pokémon: The First Movie,” just wanting to carve a piece of the world for itself, to Diaboromon from “Digimon: The Movie,” a virus that takes control of every nuke on the planet and is more than willing to use them.

“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” will land in theaters on May 23, 2025. It stars Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Hannah Waddingham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Mariela Garriga, Charles Parnell, and Frederick Schmidt.