It was hard not to get hyperbolic when writing about 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One. The penultimate Mission: Impossible movie was a feat of consummate action filmmaking, its impressiveness bolstered by its arriving nearly 30 years after the first part of the franchise, which has, for the most part, improbably maintained an all-killer-no-filler track record. 

The just-released, and supposedly last, installment, The Final Reckoning, plays like an overdue humbling, evidence that the instincts of executive producer-slash-star Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie (who’s directed every Mission: Impossible movie since 2015’s Rogue Nation) can’t always translate into action-movie par excellence. That isn’t to say that The Final Reckoning is devoid of exceptional filmmaking. A climactic high-in-the-sky dogfight and a mid-movie excursion inside a slowly-toppling-over submarine at the bottom of the freezing-cold Bering Sea deliver the brand of how-did-they-do-that thrills that have continued distinguishing the espionage show-inspired Mission: Impossible movies from their contemporary action-film peers.

But those sequences are also among surprisingly few show-stopping set pieces in The Final Reckoning, which is less inclined to be, as Dead Reckoning so excitingly was, an indefatigable chase movie above all else. Clearly burdened with the pressures of being a satisfying, loose-ends-tying finale, it spends an inordinate amount of time reiterating the evils of the Big Bad introduced in the last movie — an all-powerful AI called The Entity hell-bent on destroying the world — and flashbacks to earlier moments in the series to drive home the commitment (and only snowballing extraordinariness) of its Cruise-portrayed protagonist, the Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt. Those traits — tedious exposition dumps, an overreliance on looking backward — have seldom been found in a franchise that’s long understood the merits of getting to the point, keeping anything that can’t be shuttled around inside an action sequence to a minimum.

Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, and Simon Pegg in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. All imagery courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Cruise’s persuasiveness as a quick-on-his-feet not-quite-superhero hasn’t dimmed over the years. His mounting, by-now-legendary determination to do most of his own life-risking stunts has been part of the reason to go to the Mission: Impossible movies in the first place. Wanting to find out how he’s again defied death for our viewing pleasure has given the series, especially of late, additional jolts of urgency, knowing that some of the perilousness on display is going unprotected by the same number of behind-the-scenes safeguards conventionally made action movies employ. 

Cruise’s greatness at his job veers into the self-congratulatory in The Final Reckoning. There’s so much fawning over him by other characters in the film that his stand-in, Hunt, is elevated into a sort of messianic figure, christened more than once as the only person truly capable of saving jeopardized mankind. Sometimes compared to silent-movie icons like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, Cruise’s breathtaking readiness to risk his life previously felt like more of a given in the Mission: Impossible movies — an extension of the actor’s admirable allegiance to a good final product. In The Final Reckoning it feels like he also tacitly wants us to bow down to him for it. It’s silly, though I do appreciate Cruise’s hatred of humanity-destroying AI and yearn for a simpler world where his freaky intrepidness could dismantle it with the help of some other crackerjacks. (Who, disappointingly, mostly have their personalities sanded down in The Final Reckoning to make room for them to deliver information.)

I also yearn for the proven-to-be-versatile Cruise to again play someone close to regular — something he hasn’t done consistently since the aughts — even if he evidently has trouble presenting himself as anything other than something of an unstoppable force. He’ll apparently get closer than he has in a while next year, with an Alejandro González Iñárritu-directed comedy he’s executive producing and starring in. Maybe Cruise understands that after triumphing over the impossible so many times, there comes a point where there’s nowhere to go but down.