So you’ll recall that I was annoyed with the previous Mission: Impossible movie because it was a good action movie, but it wasn’t really a spy thriller in the way that the franchise should be. The good news is, this one is absolutely a spy thriller, and is the best installment in the franchise yet.

It’s a movie that throws some unsettling things at you early-on, and makes it so that you’re genuinely unsure who can be trusted throughout the whole movie, with lots of deceptions and double agentry where people are definitely saying opposite things to different people, and it’s not clear who they’re lying to.

So now take all that spy intrigue stuff, combine it with some elaborate (and well-staged) setpiece action sequences that are like James Bond scaled up 10x (and which make absolutely no objective sense), and you’ve got yourself a recipe for something that is doing exactly what this franchise should do, and doing it well.