MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING

Yes — this is exactly the kind of blockbuster Movieguide loves to champion. Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise close out this saga with a thriller that's exhilarating, patriotic, and, unexpectedly, laced with genuine Christian imagery: a hero who dies and rises, a heroine literally named Grace, a villainous AI called an "anti-god device." That's rare, deliberate work for a summer tentpole.

It costs you two-plus hours of sustained, intense action — gunfights, underwater peril, a brutal offscreen sledgehammer fight — and seven mostly light obscenities (no "f" or "s" words, one "for God's sake"). No sex, brief upper male nudity, no drinking or drugs.

Families with older children can weigh the caution notes and decide together. Teens and adults will walk away entertained and, if they're paying attention, a little moved. Bottom line: see it, and don't be surprised if it gives you more to talk about than you expected.

A rogue artificial intelligence called The Entity has slipped into every digital device on earth — and now it wants control of the world's nuclear arsenals to end the human race. Ethan Hunt has one shot at stopping it, but Washington no longer trusts his judgment, and a brilliant, unstable assassin named Gabriel wants the same weapon Ethan needs for himself. To have any chance, Ethan must convince the President to let him lead his team one last time. What it costs him from there, we'll let you discover.

Four stars means this is McQuarrie and Cruise's franchise firing on every cylinder. The film moves from one elaborate action setpiece to the next — a 500-foot dive to a wrecked submarine, a mid-air fight between biplanes — without ever losing track of its characters, including the supporting ones. Tense scenes in the White House situation room give the spectacle real stakes, and small human touches (a wink between teammates, a heartfelt goodbye before a dangerous mission) keep a two-and-a-half-hour runtime from ever dragging.

The cast is first-rate across the board: Cruise anchors it, Hayley Atwell and the team support him well, Esai Morales makes a genuinely unsettling villain, and Angela Bassett and Nick Offerman bring weight to the Washington scenes. It's a nearly clockwork piece of blockbuster filmmaking.

This is a franchise action film that reaches, deliberately, for Christian language and imagery — and it's worth naming plainly, because it's unusual and well done. Ethan Hunt is explicitly framed as a messianic figure who undergoes a symbolic death and resurrection. The romantic lead is named Grace, and it's Grace who saves him — and arguably the world. A cross-shaped key unlocks the villainous computer's "source code." The Entity itself is called an "anti-god device," a fittingly apocalyptic, almost Antichrist-like adversary, while the human villain Gabriel plays a Judas figure who betrays the very evil he once served. People sacrifice themselves for others throughout, and the hero's defining trait — praised outright by his closest friend — is that he always looks out for other people and does the right thing.

The film also carries a strong pro-American, patriotic current, and it never undercuts the moral seriousness it's reaching for with cynicism or nihilism. It isn't a sermon, and its theology is loose metaphor rather than doctrine — but the longing it dramatizes, for a savior who lays down his life for others, points somewhere real. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

This is a rare blockbuster that's both a genuine crowd-pleaser and, underneath the spycraft and explosions, surprisingly sincere about sacrifice and grace. It earns its caution note with real intensity, but it earns its stars honestly too. Worth the trip — teens and adults.