Here it is – after 29 years and 8 films, the apparent end for Mission: Impossible. What began life as a 90s thriller remake of a 60s TV show has morphed into one of the most consistent action franchises around, one that has cemented Tom Cruise’s place as a King of Hollywood. So how do you bring this whole show to a close? With the longest edition to date, a sprawling, apocalyptic work where it’s all on Cruise’s Ethan Hunt to, once again, prevent the end of the world.

Picking up shortly after Dead Reckoning’s exhilarating runaway train finale, Final Reckoning finds the world on the brink. The Entity, a big bad AI, must be stopped. And it’s all down to Hunt and his team. So far, so very Mission: Impossible, with a set-up that surely promises thrilling action beats.

And this, unfortunately, is where Final Reckoning begins to fall down. Where previous instalments (including three marshalled by returning writer and director Christopher McQuarrie) were propulsive action ballets, briskly moving from set piece to set piece with exposition effectively breadcrumbed throughout, this new one has a worrying absence of action. For at least an hour, the film weaves an increasingly impenetrable plot before we get a snifter of a good time. There are issues held over from the previous instalment, plot holes that grow wider on inspection. It really doesn’t help how bland The Entity is as an enemy. You really miss how much of a POS Philip Seymour Hoffman is in the third instalment. Or Henry Cavill’s wonderful moustache and reloading arms in Fallout. Mission: Impossible is only ever as good as the threat faced and it’s one area where this film really is lacking.

There’s a sense here that the film doesn’t quite know how to proceed. For a film acting as such a strident warning about AI, what is mostly missing here is life itself. The action is kept hidden away from the wider world – in remote outposts, submarines and nuclear bunkers. The script is woefully overwritten, stuck in a constant loop of telling us, in hushed tones, that this really is the end and only Hunt can save the day. As Cruise has shaped himself as the saviour of cinema (which he may well be), here Hunt is shaped as a superheroic figure, able to endure incredible feats, all in the name of world saving. It’s a complete misread of who Hunt has been for so many of these films. He’s a rogue element, a chaotic figure that gets the job done whilst ruffling other parts of the spy agency's feathers. And even though the odds are stacked against him, he comes through. But we see the damage it does to him. In past instalments we watch his body get flung into cars, barely making jumps. Why, in Fallout, Cruise famously kept in the shot where he broke his ankle in a jump. Even though, ostensibly, Hunt may fail to save the world, it never feels like he actually will. This reckoning is proof that Cruise works better less when he’s a messiah and more when he’s a maverick. It’s the ingredient that is so missing here.

The rest of the cast all gamely go along with proceedings, often relegated to boosting both the stakes and Hunt’s god-like presence. Some grapple with characters that seemed to have altered from their previous instalment. No one really has an arc here, all sucked into the black hole that centres this film. This even stretches to the film’s legacy. The film lacks faith in its audience, so bombards us with flashbacks to previous Mission: Impossible instalments. It feels so unnecessary. Callbacks are liberally used here. Some work, with one character returning having remained unseen since the 90s. Others do not, falling flat.

To say the Final Reckoning is a disappointment is an understatement. What makes it all the more crushing are the sparks of brilliance that can still be found. The finale is genuinely thrilling (even if it is a repeat of what has come in other films). There’s a sequence in the middle that, while it lacked a sense of danger, did leave me to wonder how they had achieved it. This is still not the worst Mission: Impossible, thanks to the technical prowess that is the real hero of this franchise. It’s just such a comedown from a series that, at times, has been one of the very best modern Hollywood has offered. This is one mission, perhaps, not worth taking.