Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Paramount, out now

Two months after the events of Dead Reckoning, the Entity has created an apocalyptic purity cult, is hacking every nuclear arsenal on Earth and plans to wipe out humanity. Our only hope is Ethan Hunt’s IMF team. But in order to save the world they first have to realise just what it is they’re looking for.

The Final Reckoning is a fascinating, often brilliant, often confounding mess. The film has a vast amount of cut scenes, including an entire White Widow sub plot and two full daytime action sequences in London as well as an entirely different section of much of its second act. It runs so fast, for so long, you almost forget this as, yet again, the IMF team in front and behind the camera convince us they’ve got it handled. The first hour especially is an apocalyptic, Torchwood-ian sprint through a newly dystopic London that feels like the opening scenes of Rogue Nation played through a Ballardian lens. There are no IMF agents besides Ethan and his team, no computer is safe and the phrase ‘Children of the Atom’ is used so many times you find yourself wondering whether McQuarrie’s trying to tell us something about phone calls from Marvel. Newly minted President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) contacts Ethan via a self-destructing VHS tape. The world is upside down, and the only person comfortable there is Ethan Hunt.

The highlight of these first two acts is Ethan communing directly with the Entity in a series of apocalyptic visions of the past and possible future. This is the sarcophagus we saw in the trailers, and it gives us a chance to tie everything together in some really fun and surprising ways. Long term series fans will remember the Rabbit’s Foot, the McGuffin at the heart of M:I:III. That was the Entity, or at least what became the Entity, couching Ethan’s quest in a far more personal, redemptive light. He opened Pandora’s Box, no wonder he’s so motivated to close it again. Card after card gets put on the table in this sprint through the darkest places the series has ever travelled. We get the origin of the Entity, we get an IMF reduced to one pointman, one terrified engineer, a dying hacker, a willing recruit and a brilliant but inexperienced thief. We also get the first of several lens pulls as Angela Bassett leads a room full of character actors in looking worriedly at Doctor Strangelove style status boards as World War 3 becomes inevitable, but who starts it becomes a choice. This is the most Tom Clancy the series has ever got, and from the moment Ethan talks to the President to the end of the exhausting, terrifying Sevastopol dive, this is some of the best work the series has ever done. Hunt is called out, again and again, on his messianic nonsense and time and again, he wins people over through sheer force of will and physical suffering. A brutally crunchy close quarters fight on a submarine and a frantic swim through a rotating, collapsing wrecked missile room especially. The action, for these first two hours, feels like the character beats; the last cards played in a thirty year long game, three days before the world ends.

There’s a second pair of cast expansions in this hour too and they both strengthen the movie immensely. The first is Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman and Katy O’Brian as three US navy officers in very different places. Waddingham is an admiral, Tillman a captain and O’Brian a Navy SEAL and all three are vital to getting Ethan to where he needs to be. All three also feel like they’ve surfaced here from another movie that focuses on them and O’Brian and Tillman in particular as a pair of grimly cheerful warriors are enormous fun. So much so you almost forget their sole purpose in the story is to give Ethan a lift to the next plot point.

The second is a full circle moment as Rolf Saxon returns as William Donloe. Donloe was a gifted CIA computer specialist who was an instrumental and unwitting part of the Langley heist Ethan carries out in the first movie. At the time, Eugene Kittridge, also returning here vows to ship him off to Alaska. We find out he pretty much does, and we meet Donloe decades later with a great beard and a wonderfully laconic, endlessly competent wife played by Lucy Tulugarjuk. In one of the movie’s best sequences, Ethan apologises to him for ruining his life and Donloe gently, kindly puts him down and reassures him that because of Ethan’s actions he’s exactly where he needs to be. It’s a lovely grace note for long-term fans and a welcome contrast to Ethan’s single minded crusade. It’s also a moment of genuine emotion. Ethan, confronted by one of his victims in the middle of a quest to save everyone, receiving grace he never felt he deserved.

I’m at 700 words and we’re still in the second hour. There’s a colossal amount in this movie and so much of it works, often despite itself. But as the movie enters its third hour, the percentage of failure and success shifts in the wrong direction.

The first thing that hits you is the human cost. We lose another long-term cast member in Final Reckoning although their presence continues throughout the movie in some lovely and again surprisingly touching ways. But even as you marvel at that, you realise how much the other characters are feasting on crumbs. Ethan spends much of this movie alone and the team dynamic that’s worked so well for so long is largely forgotten. When it returns, it does so with little more than place marking for most of them. Greg Tarzan Davis is wasted as Degas and Hayley Atwell’s Grace is barely present outside her first scene. While that’s at least partially due to her being heavily pregnant while filming, the ghost of Ilsa Faust, and how dismally this series has served its female leads for three decades haunts Final Reckoning. Even the likes of Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames find themselves swept up in a scale that keeps talking about the importance of the individual but never gives many characters room to speak. The only one to emerge with a welcome amount to do is Pom Klementieff’s Paris who has a micro arc here that deserves to be picked up on future movies.

The second thing that hits you is that the film has three bad guys, all of which somehow take up too much space yet aren’t given enough time. The Entity’s plan is mystifying; a digital consciousness that wants to wipe out humanity and then be left alone forever with no one to tend its servers. There’s a fascinating story about emergening digital life here, as well as the perils of coming in from the cold from long term intelligence work. The movie never gets close to it and the Entity is less of a threat, or a presence, than it was in Dead Reckoning.

Then there’s Gabriel. Esai Morales is an incredibly talented actor but he’s given nothing here and struggles to do anything with it. Any hope of expanded backstory, hinted at in Dead Reckoning, is abandoned, as is characterisation. Gabriel is a moustache twirling villain, nothing more and again, takes up too much screen time for not enough character. The much-vaunted biplane fight scene is the first one in a while to be actively dull. It’s technically impressive but the mobility of both actors is so limited that the actual fight boils down to Ethan trying very hard not to die and Gabriel cackling as 1910s dramatic piano music plays in your head. It’s also got a mystifying closing beat, one part cathartic brutality and one part literal Looney Tunes comedy. That’s a strange theme running through the movie too. There are a few beats here that fall utterly flat, none moreso than the pre-credit sequence where Grace mugs, Bugs Bunny style, as Ethan horrifically beats two people to death off screen. He reappears, looks at her, basically looks at us and shrugs and off we go. It’s such an odd choice, and in a smaller movie it would be talked about far more but here volume is defence, and that’s rarely a good thing. Especially with the final antagonist, Kittridge. Henry Czerny is great but unlike last time his presence is just baffling. Antagonistic but supportive, desperate for the Entity but not so desperate he does anything once Ethan destroys it.

The final problem here is Ethan Hunt himself. Somewhere along the way, the scale, the personal nature of the story and the mystifying choice to drop all the backstory hinted at in the previous film combine to make Ethan into something which becomes more unpleasant the more you think about it. In the previous movie, he was essentially a paladin, a man whose relentless determination was matched only by his penitent compassion. Here, he’s The Best Of Us and you can hear every capital letter. Every one of his sins, even the ones we see in seconds-long callbacks, are absolved. He’s the IMF embodied, the only one who can save us and the only one who can be trusted with the future, and the guardianship of the Entity technology. In the hands of any other actor, that would be troubling. In the hands of Cruise, with all his well-known personal choices, it’s deeply unpleasant and it taints what should be a triumphant button on a three-decade long franchise. Hunt may be the living manifestation of destiny, but he’s also a walking ego and for the first time in the entire franchise, that’s a bug, not a feature and unfortunately not one we can or should use to save ourselves from predatory AI.

Verdict: The Final Reckoning is a mess. It’s compelling though. There are four or so franchise highlight moments here, wrapped up in a story that’s one part Tom Clancy, one part The Terminator and not enough Mission: Impossible. Confounding, infuriating, occasionally brilliant and troublingly messianic. There’s nothing final about this and Cruise and McQuarrie are openly talking about further movies. Here’s hoping those are smaller missions. If so, consider them accepted. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart