Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning review: A clunky but undeniably exhilarating closing chapter for Tom Cruise's action franchise ...Middle East

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in cinemas from Wednesday 21 May. Add it to your watchlist

Over the past couple of decades, no other film franchise has really got close to matching Mission: Impossible when it comes to delivering breathless blockbuster thrills.

The series – which first got going with Brian De Palma's original back in 1996 – has consistently upped the ante with each new instalment, gifting the world several of the finest stunts ever committed to celluloid in the process.

From Ghost Protocol's stunning Burj Khalifa scene – complete with Ethan Hunt's malfunctioning glove – to the astonishing motorbike skydive/train sequence that served as the electrifying climax of the most recent film, Dead Reckoning, Tom Cruise has never failed to wow with his outrageous, death-defying exploits.

The films have also consistently delivered enjoyably preposterous and always engaging espionage plots, following Ethan and his Impossible Missions Force (IMF) colleagues as they are repeatedly left to save the day in the world's hour of need, facing down all manner of malicious and cunning enemies and threats as they do so.

It's safe to say, then, that expectations are sky-high for new entry The Final Reckoning. As the title suggests, the film looks like being the closing chapter to the saga began by De Palma all those years ago, while it also follows on directly from the events of Dead Reckoning – with Christopher McQuarrie back in the director's chair for his fourth straight outing.

The previous film introduced as its main villain a terrifying AI weapon known only as the Entity, which had been let loose on the world's digital infrastructure and begun to cause major global panic.

In The Final Reckoning, we emerge into a world where it has gained even greater prominence: indeed, the situation is now so dire that the Entity has inveigled its way into the nuclear arsenals of every major power in the world, and is threatening instant armageddon.

This immediately gives the film an impressively suffocating doomsday tone that sets it apart from the more playful, almost light-hearted, mood of its immediate predecessors. A gloomy, desperate atmosphere pervades Final Reckoning for much of its runtime, and it really does feel that this mission is the most vital – and, of course, impossible – of all for Ethan and co. A fitting feel for the final film.

Unfortunately, the movie is also plagued with some major structural and pacing issues. Far too much time in the first half is devoted to giving longwinded explanations as to exactly how the Entity functions and the specific requirements for putting a stop to it, rendering these early sections needlessly clunky and convoluted.

It doesn't help that the film seems desperate to tie up various loose ends from earlier entries. There are a number of unnecessary and somewhat clumsy callbacks that don't serve much of a function beyond fan service, and this seems to miss the actual appeal of these films.

To give one example, there can't be many fans who were losing too much sleep over the precise purpose of the Rabbit's Foot McGuffin from Mission: Impossible 3, and the decision to bulk out an already long runtime with explanations like this rather than diving headfirst into the exhilarating, globetrotting action is a little baffling.

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There's also the fact that the film has lumbered itself with a few too many characters – from long-time presences such as Ving Rhames's Luther Stickell and Simon Pegg's Benji Dunn to more recent additions including Hayley Atwell's Grace and Pom Klementieff's Paris.

The result is that several of them feel underused or – in the case of Tarzan Davis's Degas – almost entirely superfluous. Meanwhile, Rebecca Ferguson – whose Ilsa Faust was by some distance the most interesting supporting character in the franchise – is sorely missed.

And yet.

Despite all those drawbacks, there is simply no denying the utterly bonkers brilliance of the film when it gets to doing what Mission: Impossible has always done best. A nail-biting extended underwater sequence at roughly the halfway mark is the first real masterstroke, but – quite incredibly – the franchise has saved arguably the best of all its set pieces for the very end.

It would be spoiling the fun to give away too much of exactly what the sequence entails – beyond the already publicised fact that it involves Cruise desperately dangling off the wing of a plane – but the greatest testament to its genius is that you're likely to genuinely find yourself wondering how on earth the star managed to survive the shoot.

And so, while The Final Reckoning is without question more uneven than McQuarrie's three previous Mission movies, its highs are still as high as it's just about possible to get in blockbuster cinema. And so, if this really is Cruise's final outing as Ethan Hunt, it's still a fitting note to go out on.

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