Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning                            4 ½ stars

It has been two years since we last saw Ethan Hunt in multiple struggles against the bad guys and performing death defying acts of bravery as he once again fights to save mankind from extinction. That was in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, starring Tom Cruise in the seventh film of the long running franchise. Now in the eighth and presumably final film, the 62-year-old super action star steps up one more time to rescue the world. But not before we get multiple montages from the previous films showing endless fight scenes, spectacular stunts, previous cast members of his team, villains and love interests and all those disguises. You may recall that there was an AI being called “The Entity” that escaped from a Russian submarine and found residence in the servers throughout the world, and in the process sank the submarine. On the submarine is a hard drive containing the source code of The Entity that would allow the owner to control it, but only if they have the physical key that will allow access. The Entity has also earned a following of thousands of fanatics that will do its bidding. Plus, it seeks to sow discord and keep us divided making it a possible future Republican political candidate. Among them is Gabriel (Esai Morales) who wants to control The Entity for himself but needs Hunt to get the hard drive for him. In the earlier movie Ethan Hunt managed to obtain the key from Gabriel but now needs the cooperation of the US government to get to the sunken submarine so he can recover the hard drive and disable The Entity. Oh, and I should mention that The Entity is in the process of taking control of all the nuclear arsenals in the world so that it can launch the weapons and annihilate mankind because people are the main problem of the world in the mind of the AI being. Complicating things further is the aim of the government to control The Entity itself, while Hunt believes no one should control it as that would be too much power for anyone to hold. It is a race against time as the US president (Angela Bassett) may order a nuclear strike against all the nuclear control centers of the world before The Entity can get control of the US weapons, but that would kill millions of people. The hope is that Ethan Hunt’s impossible mission against The Entity will succeed in time, (because Hunt always disobeys orders, but he always gets the job done). There are many familiar faces that you will recognize from previous films that I won’t list here. Now, if you don’t understand all of that, that’s OK. Just enjoy all the prolonged fight scenes and improbable stunts in hostile environments that should kill Hunt but don’t just like all the previous Mission: Impossible movies. It’s a great way to spend nearly three hours of your time in a movie theater, especially since after nearly thirty years this is reputedly the final film of the Mission: Impossible series.