‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING’: RATED PG-13

Not many film franchises result in a run of nearly three decades, but the “Mission: Impossible” action spy series has achieved that feat with the main agent, Ethan Hunt, portrayed by the same actor.

Granted, the James Bond installments, running for sixty years with six actors performing as Agent 007, have greater longevity, but there’s been only one Ethan Hunt, namely Tom Cruise, which is remarkable for the actor’s endurance.

A hallmark of the “Mission: Impossible” films is Tom Cruise’s commitment to death-defying stunts that are the essential component to the success of the series. Some of the harrowing stunts are just too mind-boggling to behold.

In “Ghost Protocol,” Tom Cruise scaled the outside of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world’s tallest building at 163 stories. The opening scenes of “Rogue Nation” had Cruise dangling from the side of a plane while it takes off.

In a chase to catch a train in “Dead Reckoning,” Cruise drives his motorcycle off a cliff before opening a parachute and gliding to safety. Supposedly this may have been the most dangerous stunt Cruise ever performed.

Given the history of daring stunts, what then is in store for “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning?” The last film ended on a literal cliffhanger, with Ethan Hunt and his fellow IMF team members surviving a locomotive plunging off a bridge.

At the conclusion of 2023’s “Dead Reckoning,” Ethan, along with Ving Rhames’ Luther, Simon Pegg’s Benji, and Hayley Atwell’s Grace, were torn asunder and facing their most formidable adversary yet, The Entity, a malevolent AI capable of achieving the extinction of mankind.

The premise for “Final Reckoning” is fairly simple, and it would appear the story could have been wrapped up in a lot less than the nearly three-hour running time, and you’d still have the benefit of underwater thrills and in-flight danger anchoring the best stunts.

Within the intelligence world, Ethan and his IMF team will always be outsiders. Yet, the threat of The Entity taking over the nuclear arsenals of eight countries is so grave that President Sloane (Angela Bassett) welcomes the help of the IMF outcasts.

The mission is straightforward — find the invisible AI villain and destroy its capability to unleash a nuclear winter upon the universe. The stakes are so high that others join Ethan’s group.

The agent Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) that had previously been chasing the team has joined their ranks. A nice addition is assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), who was with the villain Gabriel in “Dead Reckoning,” and is now out for revenge.

Like any twisted megalomaniac, Gabriel (Esai Morales) has reappeared with his evil ambition to take control of The Entity to threaten the entire world with nuclear annihilation.

Similar to the ultimatums that were so frequent from the power-mad bad guys in James Bond films, the grave threat posed by The Entity finds military brass (Nick Offerman and Holt McCallany) and others fretting over whether Ethan and his team can pull off a miracle.

Of course, we know better than to question Ethan’s abilities. All we have to do is await how tricky the resolution is going to be, which is thrilling enough because Ethan may have plans but he seems to be letting them fly without a safety net.

Speaking of flying, which you get a sense of from the trailers, the stunt where Ethan is in a biplane chase of Gabriel that requires our hero to climb around the plane in flight, even hanging upside during evasive maneuvers, is stunning.

Action also takes place on the frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle where Ethan discovers exiled CIA analyst William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), last seen in the first film, who helps in locating the Russian submarine that was blown up in “Dead Reckoning” and now holds a key to The Entity’s source code.

Hooking up with an American submarine under the command of Captain Bledsoe (Tramell Tillman), Ethan embarks on a perilous deep-sea dive below the polar ice cap in the Bering Sea to navigate through the sunken Russian submarine in search of a source code gadget called the Podkova.

The narrative in the early going feels like unnecessary padding of the story, especially when the audience expects something forceful, bold and aggressive to quickly appear and deliver a spectacle. But patience is a virtue that is rewarded with epic action that has always defined the franchise.

At a running time that exceeds that of previous installments, “Final Reckoning” would have benefited from tighter editing, but in the end the action payoff is just so good that if this eighth film is indeed the last, then it is absolutely worth seeing.

As the capstone to Ethan Hunt’s and the IMF team’s exploits, “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is fittingly true to form with its mind-blowing action scenes that will also be forever enshrined in the annals of a great spy thriller series.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.