When Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning quietly dropped the ‘Part One’ of its title after failing to burn brightly enough at the box office, it looked like its follow-up was free to close the epic franchise as it wanted. But though its title and the giant press wagon circling position it as the last Mission: Impossible film (featuring Tom Cruise in a lead role), The Final Reckoning is dented by a need to wrap up hanging plot threads from a whole epic saga of impossible but magically achievable missions in one fell swoop of 170 minutes.

Eight films over nearly 30 years is an incredible achievement, and The Final Reckoning does a pretty good job of reaching back into its storied history to connect the dots. A recent comparison would be the cynical hash the Craig era Bond films made retconning a grand plot (with prints of previous villains stuck on dummies). The Final Reckoning is far neater in its ambitious callbacks to the 1996 Brian De Palma thriller that kicked it all off and the pivotal JJ Abrams refresh Mission: Impossible III, too. 

But in the franchise that has run a gamut of mixed villains over its time, those instalments notably feature some of its finest – Jon Voight’s blasphemously treacherous Jim Phelps, then Philip Seymour Hoffman’s scene-chewing malevolence. Notably, the saga ends very much lodged in the plot strands started in Rogue Nation, where Rebecca Ferguson and Sean Harris stole the show, although those characters are much-missed two films on. The franchise’s arguable peak came with the sixth film, Fallout, a brilliant combination of double-crossing, nuclear bomb-stopping, and helicopter hijinks. 

The Final Reckoning is missing that recent grit as it picks up as a direct sequel to the last film and its cliffhanger with the Entity in the ascendancy. 

Two months after Ethan Hunt and his team retrieved the key to its source code, the out-of-control artificial intelligence, the Entity, is close to gaining access to the systems of every nuclear power on Earth. Ignoring a direct appeal from US President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), Hunt continues to track his nemesis and former proxy of the entity before Hunt beat him, Gabriel (Esai Morales). A massive game of bluff and risk unfolds against the clock. 

Hunt plays off three sides to save the world against all odds. Gabriel manipulates him into retrieving the “Podkova” module source code from the sunken Russian submarine Sevastopol so he can control the Entity after gaining the digital ‘Poison Pill’ at the cost of its inventor’s life – long-time Hunt ally, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames). A serendipitous communion with the Entity shows Hunt a future of nuclear armageddon as it demands he secure its access to the safe haven of a secure digital bunker in South Africa. While Hunt evades his old nemesis CIA Director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), despite Sloane allowing America’s greatest agent a slim window of time to save the world, the clock ticks on the Entity gaining control of the US’s nuclear arsenal and the end of humanity as we know it.

Realism is a wholly difficult concept in a franchise that has always encouraged disbelief to hang by a long thread alongside Ethan Hunt. But The Final Reckoning rounds out its adventure with an existential dive into survival and destiny. Establishing a speculatively fictional future on the brink of apocalypse, it’s Mission: Impossible does The Matrix. And despite the few elements set up to oppose Hunt, the suave Gabriel or bureaucratic Kittridge, they never seem big enough. The main threat is the amorphous, intangible Entity that kicks off the film in close-up, and it’s a lack of focus, a very long build-up that takes 30 minutes to light the famous titles, and a whole load of exposition that flattens Hunt’s final hunt. 

The Final Reckoning has many thrills, to be sure, although none as notable as featured in the previous two films. The threads of possibility are entertainingly strained by Russians and an arctic fire stopping the transfer of 13-year-old coordinates, and when the rolling Sevastopol makes Hunt – when he still has a diving suit on in sub-zero waters – play pinball with missiles. In particular, the underwater trip impresses as a mainly music and dialogue-free sequence.

The end bi-plane duel, perfectly reasonable in the logic of the film’s analogue ending, is thrilling but not a feat up there with the chopper chase of Fallout. It intentionally, and oddly, leaves Hunt alone and stranded, relying on his team to work the resolution — in its way, a summary of the film’s unified disjointedness.

The Final Reckoning bravely dives like its fearless leading man into philosophical points of existence, destiny, and what it means to confront and beat the impossible. It’s the stuff of enigmatic character moments, but it’s not really why anyone turns up to an M:I film. While the through-line about saving people not yet met, given weight by the surprising appearance and coincidental importance of Rolf Saxon’s William Donloe (last seen being hung out by Hunt in the first film), adds a unique poignancy but feels a bit off in a movie that doesn’t serve all its characters well. Yes, Gabriel is undercooked, but he was pretty flat to begin with. Denying Pom Klementieff’s Paris revenge and handing Greg Tarzan Davis’s Degas a pointless attempt at martyrdom means they even struggle to make up the numbers in Hunt’s superteam. Despite having to navigate romantic, comic and integral plot points, it’s Hayley Atwell’s Grace who fares best.

The film’s weakest part is undoubtedly how it shows the ramifications of the Entity’s actions, mostly run through the U.S Executive. Slowing the first half right down, as soon as the giant maps show the UK and China losing their arsenals and Sloane is forced to consider pre-retaliation, it can’t help but slip into Dr. Strangelove mode. 

The M:I franchise once revelled in the different styles of its helmers, but has undoubtedly found its archetypal form in Chris McQuarrie’s closing four instalments. But at the end, it’s clear this is a tamer form of the concept, wrapped up in a safety net of complicated plots and a broad family of untouchables. The risk became so huge, and the emphasis on Cruise surviving apparently impossible stunts became so incredible that the threat to the core team became too small.

Perhaps the heightened ridiculousness of McQuarrie and Cruise’s supposed farewell is a nod to the most lambasted entry in the franchise, John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2 (along with Hunt’s floppy hair). But the flashbacks and plot points that pivot on what happened in Prague in the first instalment, 29 years ago, only highlight that IMF agents used to have a much shorter lifespan. Mission: Impossible ends a long way from that starting point. When Cruise emerges from a fictional underground station in central London, it might as well be another universe.