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Spoilers for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning follow. Choose to accept that or look away.

If the pre-release promotion and interviews for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning are to be believed,  producers Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie were so rattled by the relative failure of the last movie in the series, 2023’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One — which still made $571.1 million at the box office; I said ‘relative’ failure, remember — that they rethought what to do with the movie that is now called Final Reckoning. Gone was the original title (Dead Reckoning Part Two), but judging from the finished product, the second thoughts might have gone deeper than that… and Cruise and McQuarrie might have taken all the wrong lessons from what had come before.

Final Reckoning is the first Mission: Impossible where you can feel the flop sweat; if Dead Reckoning was an indulgent movie that provoked complaints about leaning too heavily into comedy elements — as if there hadn’t been slapstick and screwball ingredients in the series for some time by that point — then Final Reckoning feels like too much of a course correction; a humorless, overlong movie that indulges in so much fan service and easter egg placement that you can almost feel McQuarrie and Cruise asking audiences if this is better than last time, and if this is what everyone wanted all along.

The sheer volume of easter eggs and reveals that call back to earlier movies in the series is shocking in light of McQuarrie’s recently resurfaced comments about fan service being “poison”; so much of the real estate of this movie is given over to fan service that goes nowhere and doesn’t add anything to the meaning of the film. Shea Whigham’s character is the son of the villain from the first movie? Why? The unexplained Macguffin from the third movie was actually the source code for the AI villain of this movie? So what? If the idea is to make Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt more personally involved with what’s happening, it’s at odds with the moral as delivered at the movie’s end by a posthumous Luther (Ving Rhames), that the mission is important whether it’s people Ethan knows or complete strangers. And anyway, 2018’s Mission: Impossible - Fallout did the 'sins of Ethan’s past come back to haunt him' schtick far better, and it was made by the same people who made this movie.

What’s worse, Final Reckoning’s obsession with the franchise’s mythology feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the Mission: Impossible movies good. Does anyone really watch these movies for the plot? I doubt it, which is why the series continued to be successful despite at least half of the entire series having vague variations on the same 'the IMF is being hunted by the US Government and Ethan has to clear his name while avoiding capture' idea. What made these movies successful was their dedication to visually spectacular stunts that were, for the most part, practical, and a sense of just how ridiculous and over-the-top the whole thing is on the part of everyone involved.

That’s just… not present in Final Reckoning for the most part. Not only does the film take itself worryingly seriously — while still failing to have any logical follow through for much of its hyperbolic ideas; exactly how was the Entity’s destruction meant to take down the internet and destroy all of civilization… and why didn’t that actually happen, in the end…? — but it’s more than halfway through Final Reckoning’s not-brief runtime before we even get a chase sequence. It’s as if filmmakers were self-conscious about what they were doing for the first time in the series’ history, almost.

(True story: at the afternoon screening I attended, someone fell asleep and loudly snored around the movie’s midway point. It felt oddly meaningful.)

That’s not to say that Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is a bad movie, as much as it’s an overcautious one that feels as if it wants the audience’s approval too much to really let loose until the final act. By the time that rolls around, with biplane stunts, barrel rolls in stunt cars, and Pom Klementieff performing half-assed surgery on Simon Pegg, the theater I was in was entirely back onboard everything that was happening on screen, and I was, too. It was the first time that the movie truly felt like a Mission: Impossible film. It’s just a shame that, for the 90 minutes or so that preceded that, we were watching something else entirely.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is in theaters now.

Here's how to watch all the Mission: Impossible movies & TV series in order.