Big on stunts and explosions but small on story, Mission: Impossible finale is a wild, exhilarating ride

With crazy action and mad stunts, Tom Cruise’s super-spy Ethan Hunt is back for one more impossible mission to make sure the beloved franchise ends with a bang.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to strap in for another stunt-filled, impossible, implausible mission with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his crew of super-spies

Hayley Atwell plays Grace, Simon Pegg plays Benji Dunn, Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, Rolf Saxon plays William Donloe, Lucy Tulugarjuk plays Tapeesa, Greg Tarzan Davis plays Degas and Pom Klementieff plays Paris in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING (M)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning)

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

It was almost three decades ago that the world first marvelled at the ceiling-dangling, crisis-wrangling, logic-mangling heroics of IMF Agent Ethan Hunt.

Now, after eight movie Missions – all of them stamped ‘Impossible’ – retirement finally beckons for Tom Cruise’s indefatigable, indestructible superspy.

Needless to say, the long-running action-espionage franchise Mission: Impossible will be ending with a bang, not a whimper.

How could it not?

Especially once you learn this last instalment in the M:I saga is probably the most expensive single movie ever made, with most estimates believing there to be no change left from a $AUD600 million budget.

(Throw in marketing costs, and The Final Reckoning has to gross three-quarters of a billion before it makes a cent of profit.)

Of course, all of those megabucks buys you a whole lot of movie.

So for all of its flaws and excesses, The Final Reckoning doesn’t skimp when it comes to delivering the wild ride and the wide-screen spectacle fans have come to expect from the M:I brand.

Yes, Final Reckoning is very much in the business of the tying-up of loose ends, and the blowing-up of stuff.

Tom Cruise is back in action as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

However, at a marathon running time of 170 minutes, Final Reckoning is also a victory lap, a valedictory speech and a non-stop celebration of the can-do-it-will-do-it-just-did-it workplace ethos of its 62-year-old star, Tom Cruise.

You can say what you want about ol’ Tom – chances are you already have – but no-one can deny the guy gives his all whenever he shows up for any production bearing his name.

At any given moment in Final Reckoning, Cruise can easily be spotted challenging conventional notions of self-care and sanity, while meeting the dubious demands of some supremely silly screenwriting.

In one scene, he chomps on a cyanide pill and immediately foams at the mouth like a cheap fire extinguisher.

In a number of other scenes, he can be spotted running Olympic Marathon distances at the same pace Usain Bolt would use to secure gold in the 100m.

Cruise also finds the time to take a deep-sea dive in the world’s coldest ocean (without a wetsuit!), roll and crash a jeep on the world’s roughest road (without a seatbelt!), and start a big fistfight in a small cockpit on the world’s oldest plane (without a working engine!).

Whenever the movie is simply winding up its hyperkinetic star and pointing him at the next elaborate action sequence, Final Reckoning strikes guilty-pleasure gold over and over again.

However, the creative team behind the scenes seem to have forgotten that no-one ever attends a Mission: Impossible movie for the storytelling.

Therefore Final Reckoning chews up a lot of screen time and audience patience by unspooling a very ropy yarn involving a sinister bit of AI software (aka The Entity) about to help itself to every nuclear warhead on the planet, a not-so-sinister supervillain (Esai Morales as the Hunt-hating Gabriel) who would very much like to own that software, and a US President (Angela Bassett) who has given Ethan 72 hours to sort out the whole mess and, you know, save the planet from certain destruction while he’s at it.

Tom Cruise takes a deep dive in Mission impossible The final reckoning.

Most of Ethan’s support team from the previous M:I movie Dead Reckoning – such as tech whiz Benji (Simon Pegg), coding genius Luther (Ving Rhames) and posh pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) – are all there to frown intently at the nearest countdown clock, and cut the occasional coloured wire on a live explosive device.

They and just about everybody else in the movie get at least one line of dialogue to pay unnecessary tribute to Ethan Hunt, often repeating what an amazing spiritual, strategic and world-rescuing maverick he has been within the world of unsanctioned espionage.

It’s all a bit much, really. After seven previous movies where character development of Ethan Hunt was not a factor, scene upon scene in Final Reckoning builds him up as some kind of killer combo of Jesus Christ, James Bond, Jason Bourne and maybe even The Two Jacks (Reacher and Ryan).

All that sucking-up slows down Final Reckoning at the very moments it needs to be getting a move-on.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, Final Reckoning still stands as a memorable and fitting completion of one of mainstream cinema’s most popular, exciting and entertaining journeys.

Just as the cliche holds true that they don’t make movies like this anymore, they won’t be making a movie star like Tom Cruise any time in the future, either.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in general release in Australian cinemas on May 17.

Originally published as Big on stunts and explosions but small on story, Mission: Impossible finale is a wild, exhilarating ride