Wing walking is an art older than sound cinema. Before movies included spoken dialogue, they were already filled with daredevils who risked — and sometimes lost — their lives performing incredible feats in and on top of airplanes. So when producer/star Tom Cruise and producer/co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie turned the climax of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning into maybe the greatest display of wing walking and aerial stunt work in the last 50 years, that’s wasn’t a haphazard choice. It was a decision designed to further the mission of this franchise for the last three decades: To thrill moviegoers with old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle on the grandest scale possible.It’s impossible for me to give a negative review to a movie with a climax as good as the one that concludes The Final Reckoning; Cruise hanging off a biplane hundreds of feet in the air is more than worth the price of admission all by itself. But it’s also possible that the rest of The Final Reckoning is a mess, and ranks near the bottom of this long-running franchise.Mission: Impossible - The Final ReckoningParamount Pictures and Skydanceloading...It’s not just that its story is a confusing jumble, although that is also true. Some of the script’s problems are even more fundamental than that. I do not understand, for instance, how filmmakers of McQuarrie and Cruise’s expertise and experience could make a movie that never explains why one of its key characters spends almost all of his scenes in an underground hospital. Is this person dying? Can they be cured? Despite a runtime of 170 minutes, The Final Reckoning can’t find room to answer those basic questions.That decision is all the more baffling because that same character looked completely fine when they last appeared in the previous Mission: Impossible, 2023’s Dead Reckoning — Part One. The Final Reckoning establishes that two months have passed since the events of the prior film, and while this movie does continue its central conflict, with Cruise’s super spy Ethan Hunt fighting a rogue AI known as “The Entity,” some of The Final Reckoning’s twists feel oddly disconnected from its predecessor (like afflicting a previously healthyDead Reckoning and went back to square one in the middle of shooting — which, to be fair, would be an extremely Ethan Hunt thing to do.Mission: Impossible - The Final ReckoningParamountloading...Of course, Ethan Hunt would have pulled off that kind of on-the-fly salvage operation without breaking a sweat. The Final Reckoning opens with a jarring series of scenes that awkwardly reestablish its key heroes and villains. While the Entity spreads its truth-altering tentacles throughout the internet, Ethan races to rescue various members of his Impossible Mission Force from the computer’s fiendish emissary Gabriel (Esai Morales).The same pattern repeats a couple times; Ethan gets knocked out in one glamorous location and wakes up in another. Gabriel drops Ethan in an inescapable trap in order to force him to do something against his will. Ethan wriggles free, only to find Gabriel has an even more elaborate backup plan waiting for him. (I guess when you can consult a godlike computer, you’re prepared for every eventuality.)Cut to: More running, more chasing, more hazy alliances between assorted members of an enormous cast that includes longtime players Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Henry Czerny, relative newcomers Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff, and total neophytes like Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham as an Naval officer and Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman as the Secretary of Defense. The whiplash between locations, the bewildering web of character loyalties — some people want to control the Entity, some want to destroy it — is such a muddle I started to wonder whether Ethan was trapped inside an impressive but not wholly convincing computer simulation of reality he would eventually recognize and escape in true impossible mission fashion.Mission: Impossible - The Final ReckoningParamountloading...No such luck. To be sure, when The Final Reckoning finally puts all its pieces in place, it quite literally flies. But there also some truly clunky exchanges — something that has never been the case in the Mission: Impossible franchise before, especially since McQuarrie took over as writer and director with 2015’s Rogue Nation. That includes way too many self-congratulatory Easter eggs from throughout the history of the franchise. The callbacks include multiple clip montages, surprise cameos, and totally unnecessary explanations of unresolved Mission plot threads. Even the date of the first Mission: Impossible’s premiere becomes an crucial plot point.I love these movies as much as anyone on the planet; I’ve seen every single one in a theater, most multiple times. A few of the references made me smile; most felt indicative of a film that’s a bit too clever for its own good. Every single thing in every single movie does not needs to connect to everything else.Mission: Impossible - The Final ReckoningParamountloading...The spectacular aerial climax is one of four do-or-die missions all happening simultaneously in The Final Reckoning’s final minutes. While I appreciated the attempt to top every previous world-saving effort — and Cruise’s commitment to these movies is beyond reproach — I also found myself a little disappointed every time McQuarrie cut away from him dangling off that biplane. The other characters don’t add more tension; they distract from the main event. The old masters of early movie stunts who Cruise and McQuarrie so obviously admire knew that sometimes simpler was better.Additional Thoughts:-Flashbacks sprinkled throughout Dead Reckoning established that Gabriel played a role in a mysterious tragedy that led Ethan to join the IMF. In these flashbacks, Esai Morales appeared as a young man, presumably de-aged using digital technology. The Final Reckoning doesn’t really pay off this subplot (yet another element from the last film that gets dropped) but in the brief snippets that do appear in The Final Reckoning, Cruise’s face is never shown. The “young“ Ethan Hunt only appears from behind or in shadow. In a movie all about Ethan Hunt trying to destroy a truth-manipulating computer that can alter reality, that feels notable.-Also notable: Ethan Hunt wants to destroy the Entity, but because the Entity has infiltrated every corner of cyberspace, that means Tom Cruise may have to destroy the entire internet in the process.RATING: 6/10Guilty Pleasure Movies From the ’90sThese ’90s films do not have good reputations. Most are cheesy and a few are really dated. We love them anyway.