'A miserable, apocalyptic tract': Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning could be 'the feel-bad film of the summer'

The opposite of an escapist blockbuster, the eighth and apparently final outing for Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt is the doomiest and gloomiest yet in the action-adventure franchise.

With so much tension and conflict around the world, it can be a relief when a Hollywood blockbuster distracts audiences with some escapism, some optimism, and some rollicking, good-natured fun. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is not that kind of blockbuster. The eighth instalment in Tom Cruise's globe-trotting action-adventure franchise, The Final Reckoning is a miserable, apocalyptic tract which is fixated on the subjects of how close we are to nuclear armageddon, and how quickly civilisation can collapse. Yes, 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.

"Truth is vanishing, war is coming," someone intones at the beginning of the film, and then we're subjected to shots of missiles launching and cities being obliterated. In place of snappy banter, there is cod philosophy about destiny and choice, and in place of Lalo Schifrin's adrenaline-pumping classic theme, there are orchestral minor chords on the soundtrack. What's disappointing about all this doom and gloom is that the franchise has made the kind of whiplashing U-turn you might see in its car-chase sequences. The last Mission: Impossible film, Dead Reckoning, was a funny, frothy Euro-caper sprinkled with mischief, glamour and romance – or as close to romance as you're ever going to get in a Cruise production – and the follow-up has the same writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie. Yet The Final Reckoning, set almost entirely in tunnels and caverns, and in the depths of the ocean, is the dullest and darkest film in the series, both literally and figuratively.

It 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. Again and again, we have to sit through these ponderous, portentous mutterings: the title might as well have been Exposition: Interminable. Usually, these scenes are punctuated with flashbacks to what's happened before, flash-forwards to what might happen in the future, and flash-sideways (if that's a term) to different people, in different shadowy rooms, explaining the same story in the same gravelly whispers. But instead of livening up the exposition, this frantic editing hints that McQuarrie and his team couldn't get the plot underway, and so they kept cutting the footage into smaller and smaller snippets in the hope that we might not notice.

The depressing mood might have been forgivable if The Final Reckoning were a genuinely intelligent and complex drama. But it is, unfortunately, as stupid as Hollywood blockbusters get. The premise, which follows on from Dead Reckoning, is that an artificial intelligence called the Entity has taken over the internet, and will soon launch a global nuclear strike which will exterminate the human race. I'm not sure why it wants to do this, or how the good guys know its plans, but never mind. The point is that Cruise's character, Ethan Hunt, can eliminate this existential threat via some surprisingly simple means. All he has to do is click two small gadgets together, and the Entity will be a Non-Entity.

One of these gadgets is a box containing the Entity's source code, which is currently in a wrecked submarine – hence a deep sea-diving set piece which gets full marks for spookiness, and no marks for excitement. (How long do you want to watch someone swimming silently through murky water with no villains chasing him?) The other gadget that Ethan needs to end the Entity is a "poison pill" – a thumb drive, basically – which has been invented by his pal Luther (Ving Rhames). In the world of Mission: Impossible, then, this poison pill is just about the most important object in history. It can literally save mankind. So why does Ethan leave it in the pocket of his unguarded, incapacitated friend, thus allowing it to be stolen easily by the bad guy, Gabriel (Esai Morales)?

The irony is that the film keeps praising its main character to the skies. When we're not hearing speeches about how heroic he is (delivered in gravelly whispers, naturally), we're watching montages of clips from the other films in the series, as if someone were about to hand him a lifetime achievement award. But no one even mentions how catastrophically stupid he was for not putting Luther's poison pill somewhere safer.

There are countless plot problems like this to get past before the film eventually reaches the one action sequence that viewers might want to rewatch, ie, the one on the poster, with Cruise clinging to a biplane in mid-air. As we're often told, Cruise does his own stunts – and he does them brilliantly – so if you love seeing his face being blasted out of shape by high-altitude, high-velocity winds, then you'll enjoy his latest feat of aerobatics. But it's not the most original set piece: essentially, it's the helicopter sequence in Mission: Impossible – Fallout mixed with the cargo plane sequence in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. And you do have to ask: biplanes? Really? The choice of such an antiquated vehicle suggests that the film-makers had ticked off every other mode of transport in the course of the franchise's three-decade run, and so biplanes were pretty much all they had left.

If there is another sequel, then the gang will be forced to pedal around a park on penny-farthings, so maybe it's for the best that The Final Reckoning is being marketed as Mission: Impossible's grand finale. It's just a shame that the series' farewell had to be so solemn – and so silly.

★★☆☆☆

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