Hats off to Agent Cruise, the only man who can make my heart race that fast. His 40-year dedication to extreme, practical stunts is why the MI saga holds an elevated position in action cinema. Whether his return to underwater sequences or clinging to a moving plane at 140 mph, Cruise really is the last man standing against CGI other than Nolan. Just for the action scenes, Final Reckoning deserves to be watched in an IMAX theater, preferably with comfortable seating options unless you want a backache from all the clenching. But, there's always a but, the movie's storytelling is much worse than its prequel. The first hour of the film is surfeited with explanatory dialogue and contextualization, which becomes quite frustrating pacing-wise. Stylistically, there's also a superfluous amount of frontal close-ups and Dutch angles, which are really cheap choices for an epic finale. I loved the Entity in Part One because its mission remains unclear even to the end, but this movie blows that setup and we're again relying on one hero to save us from nuclear armageddon. To double down on that decision, the film spends its entirety adding stakes to this supposed world destruction by using countdowns numerous times and allowing the gloomy tension to pervade every scene, as the story is so self-serious it becomes too heavy and hard to immerse in. In conclusion, The Final Reckoning is complete, it does bring back the nostalgia, but has a bit of issue executing its ambition.

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