Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review: Tom Cruise lays it on thick but it’s wildly entertaining

Can you imagine the insurance policy that’s necessary to cover Tom Cruise’s involvement on any Mission: Impossible movie?

It’s amazing the only real mishap he’s had in the 29 years he’s been making the stunts-forward blockbusters, was a broken ankle when he was leaping across rooftops in London during a scene on the sixth entry, Fallout.

The production shut down for eight weeks and he returned to set while still recovering from the injury.

Whatever you may think of Cruise’s extracurricular activities, there is no doubting his commitment to getting the shot. Especially when that shot is him hanging off an upside down, airborne prop plane or dodging falling torpedoes while submerged in a submarine.

There’s no cheating with green screens in Mission: Impossible, the stunts have to be practical, and Cruise has to be the one who does it.

He may be an adrenaline junkie chasing a high or maybe that it’s unnecessary, ego-driven showmanship, but it’s also why the franchise is so thrilling, and that after eight instalments, it still has the capacity to make you clench.

Your logical brain knows it all works out OK, because there Cruise was, walking down La Croisette during the movie’s premiere at Cannes, but your lizard brain is firing off, going, “Ye gods!”. The stakes are elevated when you know he’s doing the work.

The Final Reckoning feels like the end of a very long era, a culmination of a franchise, even if there have been teases that it could continue. But if this is the last Cruise-led Mission: Impossible movie, it’s a fitting capper. It also only works if it is, because, oh boy, do they lay it on thick with its callbacks to the 1996 Brian De Palma film that kicked this all off.

Also, where do you go after an extinction-level event? You only get to do that once – or you should only get to do that once.

The story picks up immediately after Dead Reckoning, with Ethan Hunt and his team – Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), Grace (Hayley Atwell) and new additions Paris (Pom Klementieff) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) – trying to stop the pernicious AI known as The Entity from taking over and launching every nuclear arsenal in the world.

Hunt is battling bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales), the Russians, and the American security establishment (Angela Bassett, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Nick Offerman, Mark Gatiss, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer) who are, rightly, sceptical of this rule-flouting agent and, of course, physics and the limits of the human body.

All the while, the clock is literally counting down to the end of the world.

For all of its thematic seriousness around AI technology and nuclear proliferation (it doesn’t like them), and trust and kindness, The Final Reckoning is very, very silly and some of the stilted dialogue genuinely makes you cackle.

There are action set-pieces where everything goes wrong to the level of a Buster Keaton farce while the scenes involving the US president and her security council are so arch, it has Dr Strangelove vibes.

But you suspect it’s all intentional because Mission: Impossible has a sense of humour about itself. It understands the value of timing, of suspense and release.

That makes all the more ludicrous aspects and generous run time forgivable because its raison d’etre is to entertain, and it certainly does that.

It always does more than it needs to, whether that’s earnest emotional beats or the spectacle. Those extra bits – and it is, indeed, very extra – are responsible for this narrative that Cruise is the saviour of the big screen cinema experience. Mission: Impossible exploits it in its marketing, as it should.

In what may be the only piece of subtext in a film that always states the obvious, The Final Reckoning opens with an extended flashback package accompanied by an exposition dump.

It serves three purposes. One, it catches audiences up on a convoluted plot. Two, the flashbacks runs through almost three decades of Mission: Impossible shenanigans - scaling the Burj Khalifa, HALO jumping, that motorcycle leap into a freefall, hanging off a military plane – and reinforces that there is no other movie franchise quite like it.

Three, when Bassett’s Erika Sloane says to Ethan in VO, “we thank you for your service”, it’s really the whole franchise thanking Cruise. He has become the industry’s unofficial ambassador for going to the movies, not sitting at home and pressing play.

It’s a worthy campaign, and obviously you should watch Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on the biggest cinema screen near you.

But the real health of the moviegoing experience should be measured by how many people are turning up to indie adult dramas or studio comedies, the films that don’t rely on stunts, spectacle and intellectual property.

Cruise, who used to be a mainstay across a range of genres, has not made a movie without action sequences since the 2008 WWII drama Valkyrie. The real test will be what happens when he returns to them in a post-Mission: Impossible world, which he is doing in Alejandro G. Inarritu’s next film.

Little is known about it, but Cruise is not expected to don a parachute. Can he still sell tickets without one?

Rating: 3.5/5

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in cinemas on Saturday, May 17