By the time Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning trudges its way to the end of its bag of tricks, a question looms and it is as large as the aura of Tom Cruise's Agent Ethan Hunt.
Will the eighth and presumably final instalment of the popular action-adventure franchise leave the audience asking for more or have them wondering if they have had enough? The answer is likely to tilt more towards the latter.
This mission, a strenuous continuation of what was left incomplete in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, suffers from an excess of expositions - a sure sign that the screenplay has holes that needed to be plugged before being sent out into the world.
Almost all through the film, the characters engage in constant chit-chat with the purpose of clearing the air - and the ground - for Hunt's hunt for the fiendish Gabriel (Esai Morales), who makes no bones about his desire to wrest control of a truth-devouring parasitic Artificial Intelligence called "Entity", that can wipe out all of humankind by infecting cyberspace and breaching the arsenals of nations that possess nuclear weapons.
Hunt and his core team - Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), pickpocket-turned-agent Grace (Hayley Atwell) and former assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) - race against time to recover the Entity's original source code buried in a wrecked Russian submarine, and pair it with a "poison pill" developed by Luther in order to neutralise it.
If they don't, the predatory AI could lay everything to waste and wipe out all life from the face of the earth.
The film isn't all action and not all the action that it mounts has the heart-pounding velocity and energy that can help the script by director Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen paper over its many loopholes and dull stretches.
It appears to dangle between two conflicting impulses - one the desire to peddle pop philosophy about the dangers humankind faces from autocrats, warmongers, and the impending weaponization of AI and two, the urge to give the fans of the franchise the explosive, unbridled onscreen spectacle that they expect.
As a spectacle, the film works fine for the most part. As a commentary, not so much. Humanity is on the edge. It is at the mercy of pernicious forces. Its future rests on the invincible Agent Hunt.
"The world is changing, truth is vanishing, war is coming, the US President, who is a Black woman played by Angela Bassett (last seen in Mission: Impossible - Fallout as the CIA deputy director), says to the globe-trotting, messianic agent out to save the world from annihilation.
Later on, Grace, who can, in a blink of an eye, filch objects that he sets her sights, tells Hunt, "The whole world is in trouble and you are the only one I trust to save it."
The man, clearly, is accustomed to having such unquestioning faith reposed in him.
Others who swear by Hunt's survival skills say pretty much the same. The idea seems to be to bestow God-like quality upon Hunt so that we continue to believe in his abiding ability to defy death and endure personal tragedies.
Cruise, expectedly, gets to do all the stuff that defines the character and the impossible feats that he is known to pull off. He dives deep into an ocean armed with a cruciform key to retrieve a crucial portable device from the bottom of the Bering Sea, hangs from a biplane while fighting off an adversary, and even jumps into an action sequence in his underpants aboard a US submarine.
But notwithstanding all the set pieces that the film assembles, The Final Reckoning isn't as much pure fun as Dead Reckoning was. The burden of its world-weary message weighs it down.
Its oracular pronouncement (repeated ad nauseum) about those that live and die in the shadows, not only for those that they hold close but also for those they will never meet, loses it edge owing to the continual and laboured attempts to play up the altruistic spirit of the IMF team.
The film turns overly ponderous in the run-ups to its many action scenes and even when mayhem unfolds on the screen the combatants never stop chattering away, announcing their intentions not just to the people that they are up against but also to the audience in the hope of keeping it invested in the proceedings. The strategy does not always work.
The film is a cinematic complex of fadeouts and fade-ins, flashbacks and flash forwards, montages of fleeting snatches from previous M:I films, and old characters and new. It is often distracting, if not outright confusing.
The fancy lensing and lighting by cinematographer Fraser Taggart - much of the film pans out in shadowy crypts, concealed crannies, and dimly lit caves and war rooms - and the frenetic editing by Eddie Hamilton aren't enough to deflect attention from what is missing in this purported swan song.
If this is indeed meant to be a parting shot, it needed to be far more rousing. Be that as it may, if you have three hours to spare and want to see how Cruise is doing as Ethan Hunt three decades on, you could consider giving the film a shot. It has no dearth of exciting passages that give the star all the room that he needs to display his proven wares.
But be warned, the underwater sequence in The Final Reckoning is excruciatingly protracted. The interminable solo dive-and-search operation is the dullest bit in a film that struggles to find the inspiration to keep going in the face of a debilitating lack of novelty.
The film begins with a recorded message from a President and ends with a pep talk from a dead friend of Hunt's. The pal reminds the protagonist that the world as we know it deserves to be saved from the wrong hands, and that mankind still needs Ethan Hunt.
So, here is another question to end this review with - do we really still need him or has the man we have loved all these years outlived his utility? Going by the evidence available here, he may have.