Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is 'a gigantic waste of everyone's money'

Mission Impossible started out in life as a 1960s TV series, one of many inspired by the James Bond phenomenon, though more successful than most.

There was a team led by heroic Jim Phelps and four offsiders. They’d be given an impossible mission each week. That was it. Oh, and it had a dynamite theme tune.

Years later, at the height of the remake-of-old-TV-shows craze – Charlie’s Angels, Maverick, The Fugitive and so on – Tom Cruise, then and now the biggest star in the world, thought Mission Impossible could be a good excuse to do a few death-defying stunts. And he hired Brian de Palma to direct it.

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De Palma’s Mission Impossible exceeded all expectations. It was a real movie with a genuinely unexpected twist at the start, a fabulous cast, Cruise at his best and some great stunts.

And it set the scene for a hugely profitable franchise, culminating in this week’s Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning.

Here’s the good news. This one’s got another good cast – not quite as good as the last film which squandered Rebecca Fergusson and Vanessa Kirby, as well as Hayley Atwell, Janet McTeer and Angela Bassett who return in this one.

And it’s had enthusiastic reviews, possibly overpowered by how big it is. It’s enormous - three hours, mostly taken up with endless, pointless exposition and equally interminable action sequences.

These, incidentally, all seem to have been dreamed up by Cruise in a spirit of “what can I do that will top the last ridiculous set of stunts?”

Last time, you may remember, he drove a motorbike off the top of a mountain, took part in a car-chase, driving while handcuffed to the passenger seat, and climbed the entire length of a train, as it slowly toppled off a crumbling bridge.

None of those sequences made much dramatic sense, but who’s counting?

This time, our hero Ethan Hunt climbs on the wing of a World War I biplane in mid-air, jumps into the Arctic Ocean, and hunts for an ‘important thingy’ inside a waterlogged submarine as it slips into an underwater ravine.

In other words, your disbelief now needs to be not only suspended but thrown out the window while you fire missiles at it.

And if you think this might be difficult to weave into a story, you’re assuming anyone on this project has the faintest idea what a story actually is. Where’s De Palma when you need him?

At the start, President Angela Bassett informs Hunt that the evil AI villain known as The Entity has taken over most of the nukes on the planet.

It now plans to destroy the world as we know it – I think poor Atwell actually has to say this – in exactly five days.

Why five days, you may or may not wonder? Or even, what sort of villain is a rogue piece of AI? Where’s Alan Rickman when you need him?

And then, believe it or not, it gets worse.

Random clues lead our team to random destinations, where they – or rather Cruise – picks up the next ‘vital doodad’.

The key phrase “that’s a bit of luck” is used so many times it almost outnumbers the other famous expression in any Cruise movie, which is of course “what a guy!”

But the least plausible scene doesn’t even involve Cruise.

It’s watching Simon Pegg, at death’s door, talk one woman through major lung surgery on himself, while guiding another through the intricacies of rocket science. At the same time. Spoiler alert, it all works out.

Unlike this film – a gigantic, over produced, underwritten, waste of everyone’s money, particularly yours. Is it really the Final Reckoning? We can but hope.