Our lives are the sum of our choices. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

Tom Cruise just needs us to trust him… “one last time.” Sure. I imagine he will be hanging off of planes or whatever new stunt is required of him until long after he’s uninsurable. And we’re all the better for it. Mission Impossible is a strange franchise – endlessly entertaining, maddeningly ridiculous, innocuous and weightless. But see above re: entertaining. For my money, every movie since the third one has delivered with varying degrees of thrills, villains, and impossible situations.

Ostensibly a sequel to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, this film picks up a few months later. Cruise’s agent Ethan Hunt is in hiding with the mysterious key, and on the run from the AI bad guy known as the entity. In the interim, Hayley Atwell’s Grace has become a fully-trained agent and they throw together a ragtag team to help save the world (again). This team is more ragtag than usual, with last movie’s evil henchwoman Paris (Pom Klementieff) jumping on board, as well as Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), who was a CIA agent (maybe? Doesn’t matter) hunting Ethan last movie. Mainstays Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are back and another surprise helper who I won’t spoil here joins up about halfway through the movie.

The movie seems designed to feel like the culmination with the stakes being the highest they’ve ever been, the impossibility as extreme, and the impression that it could all be over, but there also is no real closure, the possibility open for more. Cruise may be in his 70s by the time he gets to it, but I imagine it’s on the table.

While the Last Reckoning never achieves the heights of the last four movies, and it especially feels the loss of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa who was killed in the last film, there are two sequences that are upper echelon of the catalog. In one, a twenty-minute dialogue free section of Ethan under water that defies logic, but is thrilling nonetheless. In the other, as the trailers promised, is Hunt fighting human villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) in the air while hanging off a small biplane. It’s exciting, edge of your seat entertainment and makes the two-and-a-half-hour buildup mostly worth it.

Angela Bassett returns as her former CIA head is now president and she’s a great foil for Cruise. Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham, Trammell Tillman all pop in for glorified cameos. Even middle-tier Mission Impossible is still worth a visit to the big screen.

Jonathan’s grade – B