Assuming this really is the final instalment in the 30 year franchise, it is a magnificent way to bow out with a series of well crafted, incisively edited action sequences and a more introspective movie than ‘Dead Reckoning Part One’ which was adept at setting the scene for this end of world disaster narrative. Back in the 90s, apocalyptic films tended to give us very clear physical threats which imperilled humanity, whether it was the rising sea levels in ‘Waterworld’, aliens in ‘Independence Day’ or a meteorite headed towards the earth in ‘Armageddon’.

In ‘The Final Reckoning’, it is the invisible but no less insidious threat posed by artificial intelligence which has placed the planet, and the entire human race, at risk of extinction once ‘the Entity’ infects all the world’s computer data and launches all of the planet’s nuclear warheads. Whereas the previous films in the franchise have tended to focus on the gimmick of having Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his allies and adversaries donning fake masks so that they can enter and leave buildings undetected, this latest instalment is both a distillation or celebration of the previous seven movies, with a series of flashbacks to key scenes and characters from those movies, while also offering something on a far larger canvas.

Instead of giving us a succession of spectacular action feats, we have two much longer sequences where Cruise appears, as is his forte, to undertake his own stunts, and where our hearts are in our mouths as we vicariously suffer and defy death along with him, whether under the ocean or on not one but two biplanes in which for much of the time Ethan appears to be upside down. It’s a classic disaster movie saviour narrative where it is down to the ingenuity and resilience of one man to save the human race from being wiped out, even if, as someone who works for the underground IMF organization, his is a life spent in the shadows and where his sacrifices are largely hidden away from the rest of us.

This has the feel of a Cold War thriller where the governments of the world have collapsed and social disorder is rampant as the world hovers on the brink of nuclear catastrophe caused by the Entity having gained control of the world’s nuclear warheads. Juxtaposed with the wide canvas – the world is minutes away from ending – is a convincing emotional arc in which the motivations and trustworthiness of its characters is always played out before us, in which yet again Hunt will not sacrifice his team at any cost.

The irony is that technical wizardry is employed to accentuate the human drama, and it feels that the film’s finger is on the pulse in giving us a ‘fear of AI’ narrative at just the time we see the way artificial intelligence pervades our workplaces. In the ‘Terminator’ films, the idea of computers replacing humanity seemed the stuff of sci-fi – believable but only when projected into the future, even if was still ‘our’ future. Here, the implication is that AI is functionally the same as the machines of James Cameron’s masterpiece, but where the threat has already arrived and where we may not have woken up, Matrix-style, to realize it.

Like ‘Final Destination Bloodlines’, released in the same week as ‘Final Reckoning’, this is at heart a film about the choices we are able to make and whether our destiny is fixed – we are frequently told by those who are in hoc to the Entity that ‘It is written’, biblical-style – or whether it can be changed. In lesser hands this could have been cod philosophizing, but Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar 30 years ago for ‘The Usual Suspects’, interrogates and deconstructs these questions of fate and agency, and never loses sight of the human risks, sacrifices and losses at its heart.

The metaphysical heft of this film goes so far as to see the Entity as the ultimate anti-God, placing this film in Gnostic territory with the dichotomy of the Creator and the Demiurge, yet it grounds all of this in a narrative that is as much introspective and soulful as it is external and flamboyant.