Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning – Tom Cruise pulls off his most deranged stunt yet
Instead, it comes on like apocalyptic scripture. Within minutes, there are vivid premonitions of nuclear holocaust, then flashbacks to the earlier films – so very many flashbacks – in which seemingly self-contained plot points are revealed to have been of seismic importance to the story at hand. During the original film's dangly break-in at Langley, fans may recall a knife slipping from Cruise's hands and impaling itself on a desk. Rest assured, you'll be seeing that thing again, and many more previously incidental gubbins besides. Even the first film's release date – May 22, 1996 – plays a brief but talismanic role.
The sheer last-hurrah loopiness of the above meant it took me a good 45 minutes to realise that not only was The Final Reckoning working – and well – but that I was watching one of the most dazzlingly ambitious, exactingly crafted studio projects of our time. Returning writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, a long-time Cruise collaborator, wittily structures the film like a single sizzling bomb fuse of epic length and explosive potential: the touch paper is lit on Armageddon, and off Cruise hares to disarm it. (There is a wonderful chutzpah in the final cliffhanger involving a wire-snipping dilemma straight out of the 1960s TV show.)
Two particular sequences stand out: a pivotal submarine raid, which unfolds in around 20 almost wordless, unrelentingly tense minutes, and the climactic dogfight, highlights of which include Cruise jumping from one aeroplane to another in mid-air. This is masterful stuff – entirely outrageous and yet, in the heat of the moment, somehow entirely real.
Imagine if it could be said that with this final episode, Cruise and McQuarrie have tied up some sort of grand project that changed modern blockbuster cinema for the better. But in fact, it's more striking than ever that the series from its fourth entry on – 2011's Ghost Protocol, which sent Cruise up the side of the Burj Khalifa with electrified sucker gloves – was built in defiance of prevailing Hollywood wisdom and trends.
Its peril is, and always has been, on a determinedly human scale; its action sequences are doggedly grounded, even when set 8000 feet in the air. Perhaps the only rival productions that actively paid heed to Cruise and McQuarrie's work were Cruise's own Top Gun: Maverick and the Daniel Craig James Bond films (Mad Max was already there): meanwhile, everyone else kept gluing ping-pong balls to leotards and pegging out the green screens.
But like Hunt himself, Cruise and McQuarrie thundered heedlessly on, proving as they went that action cinema at its most elemental could still break new ground. They were only able to do this because Mission: Impossible 's parent studio, Paramount, lost Marvel to Disney in 2009 – and left without a weapon in the cinematic universe arms race, its board agreed to let the star and director cook up whatever they wanted, at any cost, in the hope of keeping pace with their rivals.
That effectively turned the twosome into rogue agents within the studio system, with the M:I brand serving as cover for all sorts of unthinkable schemes. (This concluding chapter reportedly cost Avatar money: more than $400m.) Now, alas, the cassette deck is smoking; the whatever-it-takes mission briefing revoked. With that brand's apparent passing comes the end of an era, Mr Hunt, whether you choose to accept it or not.
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