These are, appropriately, images of subsumption. In the McQuarrie Missions, Ethan Hunt—whose great-man exceptionalism fit tidily with director Brad Bird’s libertarian politics for 2011’s Ghost Protocol—has been marginalized, stalked, and nearly killed by the state for which he works. For a bunch of silly action movies, McQuarrie and Cruise’s read on the post-9/11 intelligence state is surprisingly adroit: The internal and external warring factions are purely self-interested, and corruption is the coin of the realm. Hunt and his team (Ving Rhames as Luther and Simon Pegg as Benji, plus a rotating cast of actresses) counter this with a strident humanism, but their pledge to live in the shadows reads increasingly as a mantra to help them cope as their agency evaporates and interchangeable black Suburbans circle like vultures.

Dead Reckoning marked a tonal shift from the ominous Fallout. Its canted angles strained to capture the frenetic energy of Brian De Palma’s original and its low-speed car chase sequence through Rome was almost unforgivably slapstick. That movie introduced Cruise’s villain of choice: a malicious artificial intelligence called the Entity.

Sometimes personified by a subtly named henchman, Gabriel (Esai Morales), the Entity seems bent on wresting power from every world government. More importantly, it allows Hunt—by which I mean Cruise—to rail against tech modernity the way he did in Top Gun: Maverick. But this isn’t about how drone warfare has infringed on pilots’ god-given right to be cool guys. This is pointedly about everything, as multiple characters cite the Entity’s ability to “alter reality.” A tedious but inevitable escalation for the franchise: you can only run back nuclear annihilation so many times. But while there’s something pleasingly religious about the fear the entity instills (characters fret that it’s present in their private conversations, that it knows and will prey on their private fears), it is both too silly and too nakedly allegorical to give the movies the texture they need.

The first hour of Final Reckoning is the most tiresome stretch of all eight Mission films. McQuarrie can’t even be said to have written himself into a corner—these are unforced errors, long montages of clips from better movies and stone-faced exchanges about finality that franchise filmmakers have been hypnotized into believing audiences need. The entire first act could be cut in its entirety without losing a single joke, piece of plot information, or, most damningly, a set piece of real value.

But after the CIA Director-turned-President (a wonderfully harried Angela Bassett) dispatches the IMF team to the North Pacific, McQuarrie becomes as good as ever: Hunt takes that leap into the sea; Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Benji try to pinpoint the coordinates of that Russian submarine disaster; Hunt trains for a dive to that wreck that everyone assumes is a suicide mission on another sub where everyone seems a little bit gay. The nearly silent sequence where Hunt dives into and then out of the wreckage belongs next to the halo jump from Fallout, the plane-clinging opening to Rogue Nation, the Burj Khalifa climbing from Ghost Protocol—a perfect dovetailing of narrative tension and “how and why is Tom Cruise doing this?” The dueling biplanes from the climax exist on this level, too, even if Gabriel is essentially twirling his moustache and tying a dame to train tracks.

In the early 2000s, as the Pierce Brosnan James Bond era was winding down, critics noted that American studios seemed to be offering three different paths toward supplanting 007. There was The Bourne Identity, with its handheld cameras and supposedly realpolitik approach to spycraft; xXx, where the stunts were all that mattered; and the John Woo-directed Mission: Impossible II, hyper-stylized and inextricable from A-list movie star mythos. But as the Mission movies went on to become the century’s definitive action franchise, they increasingly borrowed from Bond, especially in leveraging exotic locations and building plots around the protagonist’s neurosis. Even at nearly three hours, Final Reckoning struggles to find time to do either. For all its superlative, death-defying success (and excess), the franchise ends in a predictable place: swallowed whole, like everything else.