ENTITY CRISIS

"Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning."

- JUSTIN CHANG

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” has a running time of just under three hours. Within those three hours, alas, I'd say that Tom Cruise has a running time of only a minute or two. For those of us who've grown fond of Cruise the cardio demon, this is dispiriting news: what a letdown after “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol” (2011), in which he raced heroically through the blinding fury of a Dubai sandstorm. And who could forget the blissful London chase sequence from "Mission: Impossible Fallout" (2018), in which Cruise spent a whole seven minutes tearing up the geometric staircase at St. Paul's, then sprinting, like an unusually stiff-backed cheetah, across one rooftop after another?