There comes a time in a long-running franchise’s lifecycle when the stakes just get too high to be believable. Take, for example, the Fast & Furious series. Formerly a franchise about racing cars, each entry now tries to outdo the rest by introducing more and more ludicrous situations including a car that literally goes into space. Now, the Mission: Impossible franchise is going through its own reckoning in its eighth outing, appropriately called The Final Reckoning.

Continuing the story from the events of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, The Final Reckoning has Ethan Hunt and his team search for the Sevastopol, a sunken Russian submarine which contains the source code of a powerful AI called the Entity. Though the team already has the cruciform key that unlocks the source code, several organizations, including the United States government, are still chasing after it to control the Entity for their own side.

From this premise, the sequel’s plot feels boilerplate enough to make for a great Mission: Impossible film. It’s got a MacGuffin, a scenario with political consequences, and another death-defying stunt from Tom Cruise.

The stakes are too high

It does, however, escalate things to an arguably ridiculous degree. The Entity, now unleashed into the whole world, has plunged the world into a near-Armageddon scenario. The ruthless AI is slowly taking over the world’s nuclear systems. As one of the last nations with an active nuclear arsenal, the United States faces the dilemma of preemptively launching nuclear warheads against the command centers of other nations to prevent the Entity from launching them.

Of course, the previous Mission: Impossible films did have stakes affecting the global stage. But they were largely contained to the IMF’s work in the shadows. The Final Reckoning’s stakes are as high as they’re ever going to get. How can you top a nuclear apocalypse?

Often, Hunt finds himself in situations that beggar belief, even with Mission: Impossible standards. Each operation — and there are a lot — must feature Hunt defying death because of unseen complications. The team must always face total peril. Compared to the past where the IMF is a fairly smooth outfit with the occasional hiccup, The Final Reckoning makes the team more spontaneous, barely scraping by unscathed.

Because of the volatile nature of the world at this stage, it makes sense for every operation to come with a degree of danger. But when the entire almost-three-hour runtime has multiple ones that go awry, it feels less exciting and more tiring.

Still much to love

All that’s not to say that the movie is a dud. There’s still a lot to like in The Final Reckoning. If you love Tom Cruise getting into insane stunts and situations, the film has all that in spades. From a thalassophobic plunge to the bottom of the ocean to a claustrophobic crawl through a deserted submarine to an acrophobic fight on top of a biplane, the film wants to keep audiences on the edge of their seats all the time.

Regardless of how you might feel about the plot of the entire Mission: Impossible franchise, the series shines when it builds from the stunts that Tom Cruise wants to do. In that way, The Final Reckoning is still a good popcorn movie. Most importantly, it’s a fitting love letter to the work exerted by Cruise. If this is his swan song as the legendary Ethan Hunt, he couldn’t have gone out on a bigger bang.