When the first Mission: Impossible movie was released in 1996, it had been 30 years since the espionage series by that name debuted on American television. It’s doubtful that the makers of that first installment—a team of A-listers composed of director Brian De Palma, screenwriters Robert Towne (Chinatown) and David Koepp (Jurassic Park), and star, executive producer, and behind-the-scenes auteur Tom Cruise—had any idea that the franchise they were creating would run continuously for nearly 30 more years, cycling through different directors and writers while Cruise’s indestructible superspy Ethan Hunt persisted through countless explosions, vehicle chases, HALO jumps, underwater vault heists, and the apparently harness-free scaling of everything from sheer rock cliff faces to the tallest skyscraper in the world. This summer, the franchise turns 29, Cruise turns 63, and, if you believe the movie’s subtitle and its press hype, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning at last puts an end to the series’ eight-movie, five-director, one-star run.

Through the early-21st-century onslaught of remakes and reboots and prequels and spinoffs, the M:I series, directed and co-written from the fifth film onward by Christopher McQuarrie, has clung to the quaint old-Hollywood precept that when audiences keep returning to a series, it’s not for the brand name but for the star. It’s impossible to imagine this cheerfully ludicrous franchise holding together, to whatever extent it does, without Cruise at its center. His scary degree of commitment—the same quality that makes his off-screen persona so peculiar and at times off-putting—has become the most unifying through line of the M:I films. Is he, at long last, getting too old for this shit? That question is brought up by several characters over the course of The Final Reckoning, but Ethan himself is never one of them. He’s too focused on his latest objective—retrieving a world-saving hard drive from a sunken Russian submarine in Arctic waters—to fret about details like his age, his physical safety, or whether he’s wearing anything but a pair of briefs as he swims his way up from the wreck to the icy surface.

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The valedictory tone of this last chapter is evident in the multiple montages of franchise highlights that recur in its first hour. These are edited too rapidly to provide much contextual background; they’re little more than YouTube-style supercuts made up of glimpses of the famous faces that have graced past M:I installments—Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman—interspersed with micro-flashbacks to memorable stunts and shots of Cruise running, always running, his hands stiffly slicing the air in that particular Cruise-ian fashion, against every exotic backdrop imaginable. These inserts are pure fan service, but they establish a mood of tongue-in-cheek nostalgia that helps Final Reckoning’s 170-minute runtime feel less onerous. The world of Mission: Impossible, with its self-destructing instruction tapes and mask reveals, is extremely silly, and the series’ frank enjoyment of that fact is part of the fun.

As far as catchup on the actual story, Angela Bassett, who in this movie’s enviable alternate universe is the steely, sexy U.S. president, is there to help you out with what’s gone on since the end of the prior movie. A malevolent artificial intelligence known as the Entity, having previously achieved sentience and infiltrated the internet, is now bent on seizing control of the world’s nuclear-weapons stockpile so as to eradicate all of humanity. The Entity has also become an object of cult worship for a portion of the Earth’s population who for some reason crave their own destruction—the extreme version, I guess, of voting against one’s interests. Since a faceless and voiceless cybervillain is hard to conceptualize, much less chase through a mine shaft, also returning from the previous installment is Esai Morales’ Gabriel, a suave cipher whose relationship to the evil A.I. remains puzzling. Has Gabriel been brainwashed by the Entity into devoting his life to functioning as its embodied human representative? Or is he attempting to harness for himself the technology that one character describes as a “truth-eating digital parasite”?

Regardless, in order to stop the Entity, Ethan needs access to its source code, which is on the aforementioned hard drive in that sunken submarine. To help retrieve it, he teams up with his longtime allies, tech genius Luther (Ving Rhames) and comms guy and all-around mensch Benji (Simon Pegg), as well as world-class pickpocket–turned–love interest Grace (Hayley Atwell), nemesis-turned-ally Paris (Pom Klementieff), and newcomer Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), who still seems to be figuring out his role in the group. En route to the Arctic, they hitch a ride on a submarine whose at first suspicious, then supportive crew includes Severance’s Tramell Tillman and Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian. Once the all-important thingamabob has been secured, in a spectacular underwater set piece whose attention to the inexorable laws of physics reminded me of the sinking ship in Titanic, it’s off to a secret underground facility in South Africa where the Entity’s takeover of the global information system can at last be reversed. The action culminates in the jaw-dropping sequence teased in the trailer, an extended aerial chase that involves Cruise first clinging to the outside of one World War II–era biplane as it takes off, then leaping from that one to a second biplane being flown by the Entity’s loyal henchman Gabriel.

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Whatever the much-repeated words Tom Cruise does his own stunts mean exactly—and they often mean more than you might think—sequences like the biplane battle are testimonials to the power of analog filmmaking when it comes to engaging an audience in the stakes of a story. Cruise really is out there, clinging to the side of that plane as it swoops and dips over a non-green-screen landscape of cliffs and canyons. A real thing is happening in a real place; real risks have been taken, real craft and skill deployed, and a gobsmacking quantity of real money spent, in order to accomplish the oddly humble goal of entertaining an audience. If you’ve never seen a Mission: Impossible movie, Final Reckoning will not be the one to win you over to the franchise’s loopy appeal: It’s too long, too self-referential, too dependent on the viewer’s affection for characters who were better developed in earlier installments. But whether or not this one is really the last in the series (and in interviews, Cruise and McQuarrie have been equivocal on that subject), Final Reckoning is a noble exemplar of a dying breed: the big, dumb, fun action blockbuster with a bona fide movie star at its center, putting it all on the line—and hanging on for dear life—just to keep us at the edge of our theater seats.

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