Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning: an 'awe-inspiringly bananas' conclusion

"Well, he's only gone and done it," said Kevin Maher in The Times. Tom Cruise has brought three decades and eight instalments of "Mission Impossible" to a close with a "stupendous, supersized and sometimes even meaningful finale".

An evil artificial intelligence called The Entity has taken over the internet and is just 72 hours away from "obliterating all humanity. If only there was an indefatigable, pint-sized, sprint-obsessed 62-year-old cinematic showman who could save us?" Enter Ethan Hunt (Cruise).

Just an hour into the film, the US president (Angela Bassett) gives Hunt the "green light to go berserk and, boy, does he deliver". An underwater heist on board a Russian submarine is "buttock-clenchingly tense", while the helter-skelter biplane chase is "one of the most extraordinary and apparently death-defying stunt set-pieces that anyone, let alone an A-list megastar, has ever attempted to put on film".

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It's an "awe-inspiringly bananas piece of work", said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. "Dazzlingly ambitious" and "exactingly crafted", "The Final Reckoning" is a "masterful" studio project. Yes, it's "outrageous" but the unrelenting stunt scenes feel "in the heat of the moment, somehow entirely real".

In this "wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure", we're given a "greatest hits flashback montage" from the other seven movies in the "Mission Impossible" franchise, but we still get a "brand new box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street-scene", said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Tramell Tillman is "terrific" as Captain Bledsoe, portraying the US sub commander with "suavity and the tiniest hint of camp".

The "opposite of an escapist blockbuster", I thought it was the "dullest and darkest" film in the action-adventure series, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. Granted, you get to see "Cruise having a fight in his underpants, and doing another of his hanging-off-a-plane routines, but even so, it could be the feel-bad film of the summer".

In a stark departure from "Dead Reckoning", the "funny, frothy" last "Mission" movie, it's set almost entirely in gloomy tunnels and caverns, and devotes an "inordinate amount of its almost three-hour running time to scenes of people sitting in shadowy rooms, explaining the story to each other in gravelly whispers".

"Tense, dense and stressful, it's hardly the feel-good hit of the summer," said John Nugent on Empire. But it sets the "grandest, most apocalyptic stakes" in the series so far, and includes a jaw-dropping final showdown that will leave you with sweaty palms. If this really is Cruise's last mission, "it's quite the appropriate swansong".