So this is the fourth movie in the series, and it maintains the ramp-up in objective quality… while also being less Mission: Impossible-y than the previous installments. (Like, I think only one rubber mask gets pulled off in the whole movie?)

It’s well done, and there are some scenes that work really well (particularly an extended sequence on the outside of a tall building (the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) that was legitimately terrifying even though obviously I know it’s a movie and nothing is real).

But it also feels very… homogenized. Like, you know what else happened at the Burj Khalifa? The Fast and Furious crew had to pull some stunts there and ended up jumping out of a window in a car. It wouldn’t take too many changes to turn that movie into a Mission: Impossible movie, nor to turn this one into a Fast & Furious. They’re both movies where characters need to hop around the world going from one exotic location to another in order to get more plot coupons while engaging in implausible action set pieces. I don’t remember what the main plot driver was in that F&F movie, and even though I just saw this one literally yesterday, I had to really think to remember what they were trying to do in this one.

So, if you like modern action movies, this is a great exemplar of the genre. It does just about everything right, and is polished to the point it gleams. But all that polish sanded away the interesting bits that would have made it distinctive, and it’s never more than a well-executed modern action movie.