STILL A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH...

TOM CRUISE PULLS OUT ALL THE STOPS TO MAKE SURE MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE FRANCHISE GOES OUT WITH A BANG

- REVIEWS BY DAMON SMITH

CONSIDERING Tom Cruise's willingness to hurl himself into the slavering jaws of death for our big screen entertainment in the Mission: Impossible films, the franchise's bombastic title has always seemed like a slight exaggeration.

The Hollywood star broke his ankle performing one daredevil stunt for the sixth film but still managed to complete the take before heading to hospital. Anything is possible.

The stakes feel monumentally high in the eighth chapter, which welcomes back director Christopher McQuarrie to tie up narrative threads from Dead Reckoning and circle back to the 1996 reboot of the TV series of the Sixties and Seventies, that suspended Cruise on cables inside a maximum-security CIA vault.