Producers: Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie   Director: Christopher McQuarrie   Screenplay: Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen   Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, Indira Varma, Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk   Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Grade: C+

The eighth, and reportedly final, installment in Tom Cruise’s nearly three-decades-old “Mission: Impossible” franchise is certainly ambitious.  The second half (though no longer officially titled as such) of last year’s “Dead Reckoning” wraps up—successfully, of course, a revelation that hardly constitutes a spoiler—IMF Agent Ethan Hunt’s quest to foil the plan of the all-powerful AI program called The Entity to take over the earth and enslave (or annihilate) humanity, as well as bad guy Gabriel Martinelli’s (Esai Morales) plot to take control of the program for his own nefarious purposes (a scheme that, as Hunt will learn, has attracted some cult followers devoted to violently supporting him).  In effect, the movie’s about saving the world by putting the AI genie we’ve all become so fearful of back into the proverbial bottle.

But it also seeks to tie together the previous chapters of the franchise into a connected whole, a goal that leads to the insertion of large numbers of fragments from the earlier pictures to jog our memories about the references to them.  In some cases the device works nicely, especially when reminding us that we last saw Rolf Saxon’s William Donloe as long ago as Brian Da Palma’s first installment in 1996, when he was a minor figure flummoxed by one of Hunt’s most memorable coups; Donloe, and his Inuit wife Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk), play important roles in “Reckoning.”  Another call-back to that first film occurs in one of the last scenes here, in which Agent Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) is revealed to have a connection to one of the major characters from it, someone now deceased.

When one adds all that material, edited by Eddie Hamilton into frantic montages, to the extraordinarily complicated contortions of the basic plot, however, the result is a movie that feels overstuffed, especially since it must also include the prolonged action set-pieces that enable Cruise to show off his still impressive physique while wowing the audience with his athleticism.

And then there are all the ancillary characters who must be attended to, starting with Ethan’s closest comrades Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), both of whom have significant roles to play in the current mission, ones that inevitably turn out to be life-threatening and self-sacrificial.  His associates this time around also include Grace (Hayley Atwell), the erstwhile thief turned ally, and Paris (Pom Klementieff), Gabriel’s former confederate who’s changed allegiance.  A newcomer to the group is Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), previously part of Briggs’s team who’s enlisted by Hunt into his at a fraught moment.

Add to these the official types who have on-and-off relationships with Hunt as their motives shift from alliance to opposition and back again.  Among these are President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), who’s faced with a “Fail Safe”-type choice when The Entity moves to take charge of the stockpiles of the U.S. and other members of the nuclear club, and Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), now Director of the CIA who’s frequently at odds with the team he once headed.  They, in turn, are surrounded by a gaggle of authority figures with varied views on how Sloane should respond to the crisis facing the world; some are played by notable actors—Nick Offerman, for instance, is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—but all of them are wasted in thankless roles; poor Holt McCallany, as the Secretary of Defense, is pretty much reduced to the bit player required to intone, in amazement at Hunt’s ultimate triumph, the clichéd but probably obligatory line: “He did it…the son of a bitch!”

And what exactly did Ethan do?  Well, it’s extremely hard to follow exactly, because director Christopher McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendresen have constructed an extraordinarily complicated scenario and then built into it numerous sequences in which different characters are engaged in important actions simultaneously, their individual efforts spliced together into hectic montages by Hamilton to enhance the adrenalin rush.  The effect is deliberately disorienting, though the ultimate wooziness is withheld until the last act, when Hunt must undertake a death-defying mid-air struggle to dislodge Martinelli and his henchman from the two biplanes they’re piloting away in.  It’s amazing that this sequence—showing Cruise desperately holding on to the rickety crafts as they fly over mountainous terrain, and swinging from their wings and undercarriages (and from one plane to the next) in a bid to take control—could have been accomplished with any degree of safety; but it’s further evidence of the star’s willingness to assume daredevil risks to prove that stunts that are done practically are far more exciting than those manipulated by CGI craftspeople, however adept they might be.

Why is Hunt dangling from those planes?  To put it as simply as possible, it’s two retrieve two gizmos—MacGuffins, really—that are necessary to take control of The Entity, either to use its power (as some desire) or to shut it down permanently (as Hunt wishes).  They’re a “poison pill” devised by Luther, and the podkova, a hard drive containing the source code for the Entity. Hunt had retrieved the latter from the wreck of the Soviet sub Sevastopol in an elaborate operation involving a U.S. aircraft carrier and a submarine, as well as a mission by Benji and a team to an island in the Bering Straits to which Donloe had been exiled, where records of the precise location of the wreck might be recoverable.  The two devices must be joined in precise coordination with the “bottle” in order to trap the Entity forever.

All this rigmarole is portrayed in sequences of grim seriousness with lots of portentous dialogue and little of the humor that has marked previous installments in the series.  So early on there’s a scene in which Hunt and Grace have been taken prisoner by Martinelli and tortured (in this case the villain is after a cruciform key that unlocks the podkova), and later Hunt’s underwater dive to the Sevastopol is depicted in a sequence that aims for a sense of mystery but achieves one of murky turgidity.  (One notes that the latter is preceded by a fight in which Hunt, stripped down to his shorts, is attacked by a rogue crew member aligned with Martinelli’s cult.)

Throughout, whether it be in the action sequences or the tedious dialogue ones, Cruise is absolutely committed to the material.  And it’s his movie: apart from Rhames and Pegg, the other actors, even the best of them, are treated as very secondary indeed.  A few do, nonetheless, register—Saxon and Tulugarjuk, for instance, prove an engaging couple, and Tramell Tillman, as the captain of the sub that takes Hunt to his chilly drop-off point, makes the most of his few minutes of screen time.  The worst used is surely Morales, who’s reduced to little more than a series of evil grins and maniacal cackles as he taunts our hero again and again.  As a villain he’s even more boring than the inert Entity. He does have an exit worthy of a better villain, though.

Technically, this “Reckoning” isn’t as impressive as the previous one.  Cinematographer Fraser Taggart does some amazing work—in the planes sequence, for example—but otherwise seems content to stick with the obvious, and while the general look of the film is okay, Gary Freeman’s production design is hardly exceptional.  The visual effects (supervised by Alex Wuttke) and special effects (overseen by Ian Lowe) are variable, as is Hamilton’s editing, which makes for a movie that actually feels longer than the nearly three hours it actually is.  As usual, the score by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey includes remembrances of Lalo Schifrin’s famous theme, but is otherwise quite ordinary.

One can admire its effort to tie up not just the Entity plot line but the entire “M:I” series, as well as Cruise’s absolute commitment to his heroic role, but bloated as it is, “The Final Reckoning” is a disappointing finale to the franchise.