Has the fuse finally been unlit? After 30 years of saving the world with stunts, set-pieces, spycraft and a substantial amount of sprinting, is Tom Cruise’s possibility-defying Imf agent Ethan Hunt finally hanging up his prosthetic mask? Whether or not Final Reckoning is truly the final Mission: Impossible remains to be seen. But there is a sense of an ending here, a much-deserved victory-lap for this most consistently thrilling of franchises.

It is, to some extent, ‘Mission: Impossible — The Greatest Hits’. It opens with a valedictorian montage of all seven previous films, makes a nice narrative link to Mission: Impossible III, and even offers a scene which plays out like the Seinfeld finale, Ethan’s lifetime of crimes and misdemeanours put on trial. Hapless analyst William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), a minor character from the first film, makes a welcome return here too, the resolution of an arc established in 1996 with the line of dialogue,...