When to take a bathroom break during Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning concludes the Ethan Hunt saga in spectacular fashion, but it’s also long. Really long. So this is when we recommend stepping out if you need the bathroom.

Final Reckoning is the eighth – and seemingly final – film in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and sees Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt going up against an evil AI called The Entity.

The film is in UK cinemas now, and we wrote in our 4-star Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning review that “Cruise has raised the stakes for action, emotion, and impeccable storytelling, and no Mission: Impossible fan will walk away from the farewell feeling hard done by.”

But the movie also clocks in at a whopping 2 hours 49 – which is a massive 169-minutes – so for those whose bladders can’t withstand that amount of time, here’s when to pop to the loo. Meaning mild SPOILERS ahead.

Head to the bathroom when Tom Cruise swims for the second sub

We don’t recommend going to the bathroom during Mission: Impossible – The Final Destination as you’ll be doing a disservice to the action movie event of the year, as well as the conclusion to a franchise that’s been going for nearly three decades.

But if you absolutely, positively, categorically have to take a rest break, we recommend going at around the 90-minute mark, which is when Ethan Hunt exits the USS Bush, and swims towards the Sevastopol, when there’s a good 3-4 minutes during which little happens, and you can make use of the bathroom.

If you need to go for longer, what follows is Ethan Hunt breaking into the Russian sub, and slowly and carefully makes his way through the vessel.

It’s a tense sequence, and if you’re a fan of underwater action, you might want to ignore this advice. But it also lasts for quite sometime – around 20 minutes – so if you do drop out for a bit, when you return it’s likely that Hunt will still be swimming from room-to-room.

Plus it’s also a silent sequence, with Ethan acting alone, meaning not a word uttered. So in a film that’s filled with exposition, you won’t be bypassing dialogue that again explains what The Entity is and how they plan to stop it.

So as long as you’re back in your seat by the time Hayley Atwell’s Grace reappears onscreen, you might have missed a cool mini-mission, but you won’t be lost when it comes to the film’s plot, as Ethan Hunt approaches his Final Reckoning.