Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2hr 49 mins)

Those attending last night’s world premiere of the latest Mission: Impossible film in Cannes should have been greeted with a warning. This movie will take nearly three hours to self-destruct.

The premise can be summed up in less than five seconds. Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force, played by Cruise for the eighth time, saves the world. Again.

Only this time he does it partly in his underpants.

Cruise will turn 63 this summer, which is no age for a fight to the death in one’s briefs, but then he abides by different rules from the rest of us.

He has grown his hair this time, as if to showcase the startling absence of grey. A better тιтle might have been Mission Impossible: The Grecian 2000 Protocol.

The film begins with the US President (Angela Bᴀssett) praising Hunt to the skies, the same skies he will later grace in another ᴅᴇᴀᴅly fight, on the wings of an upside-down biplane, somewhere over South Africa.

Those attending last night’s world premiere of the latest Mission: Impossible film in Cannes should have been greeted with a warning

This movie will take nearly three hours to self-destruct. The premise can be summed up in less than five seconds. Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force, played by Cruise for the eighth time, saves the world. Again

Famously, Cruise is said to do all his own stunts. If that’s the case, a hefty chunk of the estimated £300 million cost of the film – one of the three or four most expensive of all time – must have gone on insurance premiums.

As for the actual plot, it picks up pretty much where the last one left off. In 2023’s ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Reckoning: Part One, a rogue slab of Artificial Intelligence known as ‘the Enтιтy’ was bent on conquering all of cyberspace.

It is now brainwashing folk into taking its side, so you never know who might unexpectedly try to slash your windpipe.

In fairness to director Christopher McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendreson, this dystopian scenario has gathered some credibility since 2023, what with the advent of powerful real-world AIs such as ChatGPT.

The Enтιтy is now infiltrating the world’s nuclear command centres, bringing Madam President to within a manicured fingernail of pushing the red ʙuттon.

Only Hunt holds the key to stop this happening, but of course an IMF agent’s work is never done. 

He must also find the Enтιтy’s original ‘source code’ – and foil the dastardly ᴀssᴀssin Gabriel (Esai Morales) who wants its powers for himself.

In this noble endeavour Hunt is ᴀssisted by old chums Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), as well as Grace, the reformed pickpocket from last time, nicely played by Hayley Atwell.

Only this time he does it partly in his underpants. Cruise will turn 63 this summer, which is no age for a fight to the death in one’s briefs, but then he abides by different rules from the rest of us

The film begins with the US President (Angela Bᴀssett) praising Hunt to the skies, the same skies he will later grace in another ᴅᴇᴀᴅly fight, on the wings of an upside-down biplane, somewhere over South Africa

Cruise is said to do all his own stunts. If that’s the case, a hefty chunk of the estimated £300 million cost of the film – one of the three or four most expensive of all time – must have gone on insurance premiums

Yet he’s the one taking the real risks, including an Arctic Ocean dive so perilous that he is told his body might go into spasm and he will incur severe mental confusion, rather like me after 170 minutes of this nonsense.

In previous Mission: Impossible outings, I should add, the capers were fun and the stunts were spectacular.

There’s some of that here, and evocative flashbacks to past glories, but the film drags terribly in parts, and could lose half an hour just by cutting most of the lines telling us, in about 100 different ways, that the planet stands on the edge of a precipice. 

By the end, you might be wishing it would just fall off it.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens across the UK next Wednesday