Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

Tom Cruise and company have saved the best for last, delivering an epic, funny and dramatic finale that might be the best IMAX showcase of all time.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING is everything you want in a summer movie x10.

From the opening Paramount and Skydance logos, set to a thrilling new music score by Max Aruj & Alfie Godfrey, to its perfect fade out, this is action movie bliss.

Cruise is a mad man.

I feel like after that motorcycle jump off the mountain in the last chapter, he said, okay, what can I do as Ethan Hunt to make that look pedestrian? Asked and answered. Buckle up.

NO SPOILERS here for the many surprises within. At nearly three hours, the film is loaded with them, along with deft, fast immersions into past films.

The film opens with Cruise in hiding several months after the events of the last chapter. The Entity has taken a grip over all things on the global internet.

The world's governments are on shaky ground, with the Entity now feeding idle minds and people glued to their phones with the ultimate deep fakes.

It all feels a bit to realistic and timely.

Esai Morales is back and terrific as Gabriel, the human partner of the Entity. He's the perfect blend of suave megalomaniac and warped visionary. In true Mission Impossible form, the loyalties and true motivations of many characters are mysterious and half the fun to figure out.

US President Erika Sloane, played by the always formidable Angela Bassett (What's Love Got to Do With It) is begging Ethan to come in and help her as the world teeters on the brink.

Her surrounding cabinet, including the superb Nick Offerman as General Sidney and Holt McCallany returning in fine form as Serling, make even those meetings at long conference tables feel like suspenseful cliff hangers.

Hunt's team is as funny and clever as ever, with Simon Pegg's Benji leading the way. Pegg has been great in all the films, but he's at his best here, running the team as Ethan globe hops to save the world.

Hayley Atwell's Grace was a fantastic add in the last chapter and she's even better here, fleshing out her world class thief into a full blooded character.

Ving Rhames, here since the very first chapter nearly three decades ago, brings Luther fill circle, adding a lot of heart to the action.

I'm not going to discuss the plot in depth as I don't want to spoil anything.

Cruise and his director muse Christopher McQuarrie have an incredible movie making bond. They are the Scorsese/DiCaprio of action films. You can't put your finger on the unspoken alchemy of the best Actor/Director bonds in film history, but its not an overstatement to put Cruise/McQuarrie in that pantheon.

I didn't think I needed another underwater sequence involving a submarine. I was wrong. The submerged action sequence as Hunt returns to The Sevastopol from the last chapter is stunning. In that twenty minutes, I sat jaw dropped, thinking about everything from James Cameron's film "The Abyss" and the 1968 classic "Ice Station Zebra" to Stanley Kubrick's film making techniques in "2001". Visually, this one is a stunner. The scale of it is epic.

But McQuarrie and Cruise save the best for last, an airborne conclusion that left the packed IMAX audience stunned. It's the first time in my movie watching life that I said something out loud 5+ times watching one scene. No one could hear me as the plane's engines roared and the perfect music score pounded in IMAX glory, but they were all commenting out loud too. Many variants of "Holy Sh*t!" and "WTF!" moved through the crowd in waves. This is thrilling movie making at the highest level.

Cruise is truly a movie star, but name another actor that has been this committed for decades to entertaining us and topping what he delivers to his audience.

He's one of a kind.

I fully expect many Oscar nominations early next year for this final entry.

I'd be thrilled to see Cruise get a nomination for Best Picture as the film's producer. McQuarrie deserves one for Best Director. Bassett could easily be nominated for Best Supporting Actress, alongside Best Special Effects, Best Editing, Best Sound and Best Score.

About the music. Aruj & Godfrey have somehow managed to top Lorne Balfe's terrific scores for "Fallout" and "Dead Reckoning: Part One", no easy feat. Lalo Schifrin's original theme for the TV Series is legendary, providing a core piece of music history that composers as diverse as Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and Michael Giacchino have spun riffs on for the films series, all successfully.

Aruj & Godfrey deliver the goods on the action cues, but also provide eerie, atmospheric backgrounds to the sub sequence (do you hear those momentary echoes of James Horner's notes from "The Abyss"?) and plenty of humor and emotion throughout.

There's no better feeling than getting goosebumps in a theater, when a movie takes you there. The main credits gave me that moment, the airborne battle gave me another.

I can't wait to see this again on Monday.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING is a summer movie beast of thrills, laughs and chills. What's a better grade than an A+? Cruise and Company have delivered a modern action blockbuster and a sendoff for the ages.

Run like Cruise to your nearest, biggest screen and settle in for one hell of a ride.