Few franchises live up to their name quite like Mission: Impossible. Through eight films, across 30 years, Tom Cruise has cemented himself as the last true movie star, taunting the laws of God, gravity, and good sense as he hangs off skyscrapers and cliff sides to single handedly get butts into theatre seats. As a champion of the cinematic experience, no star repeatedly puts his life on the line to entertain us mere mortals, continually blurring the line between himself and the series’ protagonist, IMF Agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise).

After chucking everything from bioweapons to nuclear holocausts at its hero, it would be natural to assume that its well of daredevil espionage has all but run dry. With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise offer audiences an epic, globetrotting adventure that finally lends that skeptical sentiment some weight. The eighth and (allegedly) final entry in the Mission: Impossible saga both exhausts the franchise’s goodwill and while somehow featuring some of its greatest, most breathtaking moments.

The series’ clunkiest script picks up two months after 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One. As The Entity—a highly advanced, rogue, self-aware AI—gradually seizes control of the world’s nuclear arsenal, national leaders like U.S. President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) are pushed to the brink, contemplating pre-emptive strikes to regain control of the situation.

Hunt and his ragtag team—Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and a few surprise recurrences—have 72 hours to trek to the arctic and beyond to locate and contain The Entity’s source code. All the while, he’s hunted by agents of his own government and the shadowy Gabriel (Esai Morales).

While The Final Reckoning attempts to up the ante by stacking the deck against its protagonist to preposterous levels, it also wants to be a glowing tribute to the series as a whole. It’s a mission McQuarrie and co-screenwriter Erik Jendresen struggle to complete with elegance. The listless first half is so overstuffed with exposition and flashbacks to the franchise’s most iconic moments that it unfolds as the cinematic equivalent of a montage episode. Momentum is all but non-existent in these opening stretches, threatening to derail the film before it even leaves the station.

While the ideas it probes are fascinating, navigating the emergence of AI technology, disinformation, and our penchant for online radicalization, The Final Reckoning is too busy spoon-feeding information to incorporate most of it meaningfully. When it’s not rapidly cutting back to the first film’s legendary “cable drop” scene or, worse yet, waxing nostalgic about a film that’s less than two years old, it’s full of talking heads spewing expositional slop. While the plot is convoluted, even for Mission: Impossible standards, it often comes to a standstill to have someone repeatedly mention that “everything has come to this.” The first half’s slack is tightened by some unintentionally funny dialogue, with Hunt’s archnemesis often spouting silly remarks like “the primordial digital ooze” with the straightest face.

But, with Cruise being cinema’s quintessential madman, these plotting issues are quickly whisked away in an electrifying, unrelenting second half. Hunt plunges headfirst into icy arctic waters, trapping himself in a sunken submarine that is home to the series’ closest brush with horror. It’s a sequence that drops the famous Lalo Schifrin score for rushing water and twanging metal, as the tension comes to an overwhelming boil in the excruciatingly slow-rotating hull. It’s a stunning moment that gives way to an awe-inspiring biplane sequence that sees Cruise dangling and twisting in mid-air. In true death-defying fashion, Cruise locks us in with bated breath, shocking and confounding audiences with his unfettered, stubborn commitment to practical and palpable stunt work.

If nothing else, The Final Reckoning is another ludicrous labour of love in Cruise’s prolific action oeuvre. While lacklustre plotting keeps the last adventure from being the best, it’s an experience that reminds us why we chose to accept the mission in the first place.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in theatres May 23