The Atlantic

Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise’s most enduring role, was rarely much more than a name. That’s the point of him; as the Mission: Impossible franchise’s secret agent extraordinaire, Hunt can pretend to be anyone, accomplish basically any physical task, and uncover conspiracies with aplomb. He’s a cross between James Bond and a vaudeville performer. But personality was not part of that package, and a backstory was entirely superfluous. After the third Mission film tried to give Hunt a wife and burgeoning family, the subsequent sequel rejected that subplot, instead asserting that for him, experiencing a normal life was impossible.

So it was to my possibly foolish surprise to learn that Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the saga’s latest (and rumored to be last) film, is a nearly three-hour salute to Hunt. It’s a remarkable, lore-filled pivot from what we’d been made to believe about our hero for the past two decades. Over time, he’s gone from cipher to human being, from an excellent showman in the art of espionage to a model of the ideal man. This sense of self-importance, however, is one that the series can’t quite sustain.

The Final Reckoning, marking Christopher McQuarrie’s fourth time in the director’s chair, has all of the required elements for a solid Mission: Impossible outing. It includes globe-trotting location shooting, wild and miraculous action stunts, and a reliable ensemble of character actors around Cruise—who, in his early 60s, retains his boyish energy despite finally sporting a few wrinkles. But the film also makes a sometimes-dutiful effort to bring cohesion to Hunt’s decades-long collection of missions. Flashbacks to the first film, from 1996, introduce revelations that newer characters are related to those who died off in the original installment; monologue after monologue from heroes and villains alike details just how uniquely special a figure Hunt has become.

[Read: The sincerity and absurdity of Hollywood’s best action franchise]

As a grand valediction to a long-running storyline, the self-reflexiveness makes some sense. But it does leave the film feeling a little too encumbered. There’s less time for balletic set pieces if it has to keep slowing down to explain how important everything is—partly because it’s so intent on catching the audience up on the minutiae of Dead Reckoning, the previous entry. But even when the plot kicks into a higher gear, The Final Reckoning never quite settles into the cheerfully goofy groove that propelled the franchise toward its peaks.

The Hunt-heaviness stems from the creative decision that actuallysaved Mission: Impossible long ago: The writers decided to start creating lasting consequences for their protagonist’s actions. The first Mission: Impossible, directed by Brian De Palma, is a swerving, absurd folly; it introduces a team around Hunt and immediately kills most of them off, thus putting him on the run and throwing a maze of sexy triple-crosses his way. Its sequel, directed by John Woo, was geared toward that director’s aesthetic: It’s long, operatic, and unfortunately a little light on humor. For the third film, Cruise (who acts as a lead producer and has always played a major part in picking the directors) brought in the TV maven J. J. Abrams, who focused the story on Hunt getting engaged and trying to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Mission: Impossible III slightly underperformed expectations; coupled with the intense tabloid scrutiny that Cruise began to face in the mid-2000s, it seemed plausible that the entire enterprise might draw to a close.

But Cruise and Paramount, the studio behind the franchise, managed to turn things around—after a five-year break. For the fourth film, Ghost Protocol, the director Brad Bird (who had previously worked only in animation) helped produce the most epic stunts the series had seen and filmed them with IMAX cameras, still a novelty at the time. The initial plans to treat that chapter as something of a torch pass—with Cruise retiring and the lead role perhaps jumping to his co-star Jeremy Renner—were also scrapped. The screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie came on late in preproduction to help with rewrites, and he reportedly derided the idea; Hunt couldn’t just retire and go off into the sunset with his erstwhile fiancée. His life’s workwas accomplishing unbelievable feats of espionage. Switching the emphasis back toward the stalwart hero and away from his potential protégé was a brilliant storytelling gambit, grafting the actor’s public reputation for mega-intensity onto Hunt’s growing addiction to death-defying behavior.

[Read: What Mission: Impossible understands about Tom Cruise]

Cruise then brought McQuarrie on to direct the next movie, Rogue Nation, and he’s remained in the role since. Under him, Mission: Impossible brought Cruise’s love of pushing his body beyond its reasonable limits to the forefront: He’d tie himself to a plane for Rogue Nation, jump out of a plane from above the clouds for Fallout, and take a header off a mountain while riding a motorcycle in Dead Reckoning. Beneath that dizzying madness, McQuarrie introduced a progressively more labyrinthine mythology, knitting the installments together in ways plausible and not, and expanding Hunt from impressive spy to a more elemental force. “He’s the living manifestation of destiny,” the director of the CIA, played by Alec Baldwin, hoarsely cries in Rogue Nation; by Dead Reckoning, Hunt has become the only potential impediment to world annihilation by an AI system called the Entity.

This choice of villain was a topical one—AI fears are cresting only higher and higher in the news. But the Entity also helped reiterate how important Hunt had become to the Mission: Impossible brand. After all, even if the situation appears to be insurmountable—whether he’s thwarting an assassin or a hyperintelligent machine—Hunt knows he can find a way to pull it off. So by The Final Reckoning, his nigh godhood is at hand. In fighting the Entity, he’s sticking up for the rest of humanity, yes; but as the only person that the world can trust to do so, he’s also being heralded as the most capable of them all.

I love the Mission: Impossible movies, and I was still compelled by The Final Reckoning, even with its sludgier opening pace and patronizing reliance on exposition. A sequence that sees Hunt diving into an abandoned submarine is one of the spookiest and most atmospheric in the series; another, where he hops from biplane to biplane while in battle with another major foe, is one of the most spectacular. But the film’s triumphalism about Hunt the man left me, to my surprise, a little cold. What was most entertaining about Mission: Impossible was never the overarching plot; Hunt’s heroism was more a dazzling bout of flamboyance from one of Hollywood’s last stars than the result of some meaningful backstory. The Final Reckoning gives him enough concluding flourishes to make the send-off just about succeed, but it nearly drowns that endeavor out with a constant stream of thundering applause.

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