The feeling of finality within The Final Reckoning extends beyond the title, the number of Mission: Impossible films, or a trip to Tom Cruise’s IMDB page to look up his age again. The film wants to complete this saga by tying everything together amid the expected action set pieces, which remain an impressive highlight. But rather than wrapping the action in a twisty dose of intrigue and reveals, the eighth and final Mission: Impossible gets weirdly sentimental, as though every action comes laced with the words “one last time.”

I recall Mission: Impossible III was more fun for how little the film acknowledges the significance of the MacGuffin, with a heavier focus on action and loss. By comparison, The Final Reckoning is too focused on its MacGuffin, painted with broad, familiar strokes of end-of-the-world technology. The previous film, Dead Reckoning, established the sought weapon of an artificial intelligence so mysterious in what it wants and who is working for it. This film reduces that compelling entity to such a stock villain, gifting the AI a voice and an easily deciphered motive.

Compared to Ethan Hunt’s previous missions (Tom Cruise), the secret agent’s path is more straightforward and has fewer uncertainties. World-ending threats have become such a typical job for Ethan and his crew that tech whiz Luther (Ving Rhames) can have a casual conversation while disarming a nuclear bomb. I wish there were more of the easy charm in the dialogue, considering how much of it is reserved for talking about fooling an AI and outsmarting the cackling conspirator Gabriel (Esai Morales).

For a film that wants to stress the end is near, it’s somewhat disappointing that characters like Benji (Simon Pegg) are reduced to spouting technical strategies with an occasional humorous jab of “this might work.” Even Ethan doesn’t seem to show as much terror about losing his latest love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell). He could have more faith in Grace being an expert thief capable of holding her own, but Ethan likely figures that he’s had such bad luck with women before that he’s got to catch a break this time.

Of course, The Final Reckoning’s more compelling showdown is not Ethan versus Gabriel but Tom Cruise versus Death. There are more thrilling stunts that look popping and engaging in IMAX, but most of them play like extended versions of stunts seen before. Cruise previously had an underwater sequence in Rogue Nation, but this film finds him tangling with water pressure amid sinking wreckage and shifting gravity. Gravity becomes a greater force amid the film’s highlight of Cruise stealing an airplane mid-flight and then engaging in an intense dogfight. And there’s no shortage of fights with Ethan and crew running and gunning their way through terrorists and Russians, sometimes getting so brutal that even the camera turns away to keep its PG-13 rating intact.

The problem with trying to bring Mission: Impossible to a close with a dire threat is that this saga is built on the premise of nukes going off and agents going rogue. This last film tries to up the ante by making it one about placing trust more in individuals than technology, as though all of Ethan’s foes will band together to stop AI from dooming everybody. That’s a solid theme, but it’s one too big for this franchise to handle beyond broad strokes. The Entity’s clever way to manipulate audio and video was used a few times in the previous film, but sparingly this time. The Entity’s plans are so basic that characters easily equate the machine’s moves with Biblical writings. Thus, the film falls back on many dusty cliches of ticking time bombs, ticking Def-Con clocks, and ticking boxes for ho-hum speeches about saving the world and appealing to humanity. While these aspects don’t diminish Cruise’s set pieces, they reveal how this franchise has been better equipped to handle triple-agents rather than sentient computer programs.

The Final Reckoning still has thrills, even if it gets overly sentimental and nostalgic for the Mission: Impossible saga taking a bow. It’ll certainly please those following every film entry since the 1990s, rewarding the aged audience for catching plotlines and characters from decades ago. But the sentimentality waters down the twisty spy thrills to a level of simplicity in stark contrast to the intricately assembled stunt sequences. The previous films had an intense intrigue for who would pull off a mask or deceive Ethan best, whereas The Final Reckoning is more about who will pull the trigger first in high-stakes standoffs. The whole experience comes off like a final week at work or school, where the expected job is still getting done, but everybody is checking out and getting mushy as they edge towards the door, even if Tom Cruise makes that dash by falling out of planes and diving into oceans.