I have no doubt that—like every entry in this series—it will be reclaimed as "secretly the best one" by fans later on. In fact, both Dead and Final Reckoning feel like Cruise and McQuarrie saying: We perfected the formula with Fallout, now let's do something different. And "different" can feel weird and awkward at first. For instance, I was lukewarm on Dead Reckoning when it first came out: too long, convoluted plot, too much talking. And all the same complaints can (and will) be thrown at this movie. But after seeing it again, I fell into its rhythms. The crisp, mannered dialogue. The perfect blocking and shot composition. The way action set pieces build and build and build to comical proportions. The way the plot circles back and eats itself. But most importantly, the hollow, terrified core of this two-part monster movie (the Entity is more-or-less an evil ghost). These two movies are about something. There's a sincere (if too-earnest) concern about the future of our species. AI and its death-cult has no concern for humans, for anything. It's psychopathic, all-knowing, meaningless. This over-the-top, silly action franchise is taking on what it means to be human, what it means to love and have friends in the face of the meaningless waste of our digital future.

So here comes The Final Reckoning. To my surprise, this is the darkest, meanest, saddest entry in the franchise. As if Cruise and McQ are struggling to maintain that perpetual wink and grin. The world is too dark for that. No other MI film concerns itself so much with the media, with cult-like devotion, with political scheming, with the responsibility placed on global leaders. Ethan Hunt has never been more isolated, alien, and unreachable. The most thrilling sequence of the movie involves only him. Instead of quips and competition, it's a 20 minute, dialogue-free nightmare. Nothing in the franchise compares to it. There's a dark extended joke before the title sequence that basically highlights Ethan's sociopathy, the anger and violence McQ is too afraid to show us. It's tonally strange, unsettling, and exciting. Ethan makes with the Entity early on, in a sequence I could only describe as: a psycho-sexual Frankenstein-monster brain-washing horror sequence. 

Much has been said about the "slog" of a first hour. This is where most of the interesting stuff happens. Are the constant flashbacks to earlier movies a studio mandate? No idea. But they're edited expertly and build the sense of paranoia about Ethan's past and future. Too much is happening. No one can trust anyone. The entity is everything and nothing. What are we doing here? 

Sure, these new elements make the experience bumpy on a first watch. But that first hour builds to maybe the most thrilling sequence of the whole series. And the film keeps doubling down on itself. When we aren't concerned with Ethan's mission, we're worrying over Angela Basset's Fail-Safe-style nuclear war thriller. And when it all feels like it will collapse under its own weight, the movie overcomes these bleak, relentless sequences with a climax that tops anything in Cruise's career.

There's a Gulp Shitto character who gets way more screen time than I think he deserves. A couple of rushed storytelling choices. Is it a good movie? Mostly. Is it a great movie? Absolutely, without a doubt, 100%.  It takes action filmmaking to new heights (and depths?) and dares to say more about this time in history than any other big-budget movie of its kind. 

This one will stick with me.