Well, it’s an M:I movie. What else do you need to know?

It has complicated action sequences, convoluted and risky plans with enormous stakes and Tom Cruise living his own myth (more on that below). You know, just like these movies have been like for a while now.

Of course, Tom Cruise fully commits. I couldn’t find it on IMDb, but I’m pretty sure Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie (the director / co-writer / producer) were credited as divers as well as their other roles, so one might assume they have gone above and beyond in that department as well. Cruise does the run, is very close to death on multiple occasions and left me wondering how much of the stunts did he actually do.

As this is an M:I movie, the plot doesn’t matter much. It’s just an excuse to get to various action set pieces and, indeed, they did figure out new places to go, which I’m not going to spoil, even though the big one in the second act is pretty obvious from what happened in the previous movie.

But let’s get to Cruise’s personal mythmaking. Remember that iconic scene in the very first movie 30 years ago, where Ethan breaks into a CIA vault to steal a list of CIA agents? You know the one, the one where he hangs from the ceiling in a black outfit in fully white room. That one. What you might not remember was that right after he left, a guy came back into the room to find the knife Ethan had left on his table. Well, that guy returns and this is actually the best writing in the movie: as the joke often goes, various military and intelligence personnel have been threatened with being sent to the North Pole. Well, this guy was. The team actually meet him in the cabin he has been living in and collecting information.

Now, the thing is, when Ethan meets him, this comes up. And you know what? The guy actually says it was the best thing that ever happened to him. Sure, there is probably truth to that. After all, keeping an eye over one specific high security room in a CIA building must be absolutely boring, and he also met his Inuit wife. However, the moment this happens has this weird feeling where we are once again making sure everyone understands that Tom Cruise is basically a Messiah.

At this point you might be wondering why I’m not getting to the reseach part I mention in the title.

So, Entity, the AI that started to take over the world in the previous movie, has been taking over nuclear command centers. So, on multiple occasions we see nuclear heads rise from silos with insignia of specific countries on them. Okay, someone probably should have done their homework on this, because on intercontinental ballistic missiles need silos and only three countries have those (US, Russia and China). Pakistan, for example, has it’s whole nuclear capability on wheels in undisclosed locations not even known to their commanding officers for security reasons.

This leaves us to the next big mistake they made regarding this. For some reason, the movie just assumes that each country has placed their nuclear control centers in their capitals. Why would you want to do that? There’s no reason to. In general, for security purposes, you don’t want to have all of your command centers in the same city, so you put them into different places.

Third problem with an AI taking over these facilities is with the lack of Internet. These place are not on the public Internet. Why would they be? They don’t need to have access to the Internet for updates or licenses for example, so they are kept out of it. In fact, this is part of the plot of Black Hat.

Of course, since this is inherently stupid action movie, you don’t have to care, but it did kind of bother me that Americans don’t seem to understand what kind of a risk they are to the world.

One final thing: The movie references a lot of things from the series and we are often shown clips from it. It’s not really important, but Angela Bassett, for example, was the CIA director some movies ago and is now the president. There’s many other such characters, some of which I probably just missed completely. In a way this is understandable, as this is the last one, but at the same time I felt it could have been handled better. I enjoyed the kind of goodbye to the Fox X-Men in the Deadpool & Wolverine for example. It was nice and tasteful in otherwise very much and very purposefully untasteful movie. (Although, apparently Disney is bringing those characters back.)

Is the movie worth a watch? Kind of. It definitely isn’t the best in the series. It is overly long as well at almost three hours. At the same time, the action set pieces are good and that’s what look for in these movies (at least after the first one).