Notes on the latest addition to a series that, in the last decade, seems only to get better and better.

---

You realize with time that it isn’t that necessary with the Mission: Impossible series to arrive at the latest installment prepared with clear memories of what happened in the last movie and the movie before that. All you need to do is be ready for your heart to race with the kind of constancy that, outside the movie theater, is really maybe only rivaled by some forms of exercise.

Even at their worst, there isn’t a movie in the franchise I feel comfortable calling irredeemably bad. Since the brand-refreshing Ghost Protocol (2011), it feels more accurate to say these films have only been getting improbably better. The title of this series, itself a spin on the same-named 1960s TV show that may now seem comparatively quaint, refers to the succession of insane binds the secret-agent characters find themselves in sequence after sequence. But it’s increasingly also feeling like a reference to how this franchise has carried out the impossible mission of still feeling vital after almost 30 years. It has a way of recasting most action movies, even the good ones, as lazy by comparison.

Read the rest of the column on South Sound.