Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Essential as the ending, and useless on its own. It is the second half of a single story and it opens as though you finished the first one yesterday. It also reaches much further back than that: material from the 1996 film and from several entries since is pulled forward and recontextualised, so the more of the series you have seen, the more of this one lands.

The first hour is the most divisive stretch in the franchise. It is almost entirely briefings, recaps and people in bunkers deciding what the stakes are, with long passages of archive footage, and it takes a considerable time to reach anything that moves. Opinions split cleanly between viewers who found it a stately gathering of threads and viewers who found it an hour of throat-clearing.

What follows justifies it. The sunken submarine sequence is almost wordless, largely free of score, and is built on pressure and a shifting hull rather than on an opponent, which makes it the most genuinely frightening thing in eight films. The biplane finale is the last of the stunts the series was built on and is photographed to leave no doubt about who is on the wing.

As a conclusion it is more sentimental than the series has previously allowed itself, with the recurring cast given proper farewells and a final beat that reaches back three decades. Watch it directly after Dead Reckoning. Any other arrangement wastes it.