The dependability and durability “Mission: Impossible” franchise has made it as sure a bet as any in modern Hollywood, but the series runs out of runway in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” an overlong and overcooked misfire which sputters where the series usually soars.

There are a pair of thrillingly constructed action set pieces that bring the kind of high-wire jolts fans are used to from the series, and those deliver. But the connective tissue around them is weaker than what we’re used to, the movie’s villains are a washout and the narrative tries too hard to put real stakes into the hands of Ethan Hunt and his crew. It’s the series’ only clunker since 2000’s “Mission: Impossible 2” and a bum note for the franchise to go out on, if this is indeed its closing chapter.

About those stakes: “Final Reckoning” strives to put the fate of the world, our world, in the hands of Tom Cruise, who is back for his eighth (and final?) spin as Ethan Hunt. But while Hunt has ostensibly been saving the world from various bad guys and super spies for the entirety of the series’ nearly 30-year run, the “Mission” movies have mostly been about themselves, a kind of game of one-upmanship where Cruise and his collaborators — chiefly Christopher McQuarrie, who came on board in 2015 and has stewarded the series’ last four entries — could see how far they could push themselves in terms of action choreography and death-defying stunt work. The “Mission” movies are at their best when they are their own house of mirrors and nothing is allowed to penetrate their bubble, let alone geopolitics and the fate of us mere mortals sitting in the theater, mouths agape.

But “Final Reckoning” wants to be about saving us, and in making Hunt a messiah figure who must deliver us from what we’re told is “the total annihilation of humankind,” a hollowness shines through the film, which isn’t usually present in the “Mission” movies.

Even within Hunt’s crew there’s an emotional disconnect, and we don’t get the same warm feelings we usually get from his partners in crime Luther (Ving Rhames, on board since the first “Mission” in 1996) and Benji (Simon Pegg, who joined the team in 2006’s “Mission: Impossible III”), let alone newer members Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff). They all seem exhausted from saving the world so many times and look like they could use a break.

Esai Morales, the baddie in 2023’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” is back as Gabriel, an ineffective and cartoonish villain from the fist-shaking school of movie bad guys. The movie’s chief villain is AI (known here as “The Entity”) and the looming threat of superintelligence, which is difficult to render in practical terms, and glowing orbs don’t have the same threat of menace that, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman brought to “M:I-III.”

That AI threat goes even deeper for the filmmakers, and throughout, McQuarrie ramps up the fetishism of old tech and analog gear, showing where he and Cruise’s heads are at not only in terms of today’s world but the way they make movies, favoring practical effects over digital shortcuts. It’s their mission statement, if you will, for both the movie and the series overall.

So the movie is, in many ways, retro: Hunt’s opening mission arrives via VHS tape, we get shots of typewriters and landline phones, and a remote cabin stocked with physical media is treated like an ideal escape from the rigors of modern life. At one point Hunt repeatedly kicks a guy while telling him he spends too much time on the internet.

It’s an admirable stance and comes at a key moment in filmmaking culture; it’s too bad it comes in a movie that is in so many other ways inert. For a large chunk of its nearly three-hour runtime, “Final Reckoning” seems determined to not be a “Mission: Impossible” film, or to stretch the definition of what makes a “Mission: Impossible” film beyond jaw-dropping stunt work.

McQuarrie spends as much time as possible talking around action without executing any, as a sort of exercise in restraint and delayed audience gratification. There are so many scenes of characters explaining a mission by finishing each other’s sentences and passing around the conversation like a hot potato that it seems like a send-up of that very trope, and it feels like endless wheel spinning for McQuarrie and Co. before they get down to business.

When we finally get to a huge action sequence, it’s a relief, and McQuarrie serves up a doozy on board a sunken submarine, with Hunt moving between various quarters as the enormous vessel rolls toward a drop off in the sea floor. Later, a sequence on board a biplane is a pure white knuckle thrill ride, the kind of stunt that would be just as interesting to see dissected in a making-of documentary as it is to watch unfold on screen.

Elsewhere, “Final Reckoning” is constantly calling back to the series’ past, especially to the first installment, so much so that a minor character from that movie is brought back and given a full arc and the first “Mission’s” May 22, 1996, release date becomes a plot point.

All this nostalgia — scenes from the other movies are given the supercut treatment in the movie’s opening moments — play up the finality of the entry. Is “Final Reckoning” truly the last “Mission: Impossible” movie? Kiss and Mötley Crüe “retirement” tours have taught us to never say never. But it

has

to be the end of at least this life cycle for the franchise, even if that doesn’t discount a new agent following in Hunt’s footsteps somewhere down the line. (With Cruise/Hunt’s blessing, of course.)

It is too bad, though, that the series, or at least this iteration, closes with a whimper, not a bang.

The “Mission” movies have, through sheer force of will, become a standard for quality in the action genre and a beacon of life for big event movies. Not film or cinema but movies, larger than life popcorn experiences to be seen on the big screen with a large group of fellow movie lovers. “Final Reckoning” produces some of that razzle-dazzle you’re used to, but it’s drawn out with nonsense that feels like the filmmakers struggling with what to make of what they’ve created, or how to neatly wrap everything up. It’s the first time in a long time that the mission seems to overwhelm our beloved heroes.

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‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’

GRADE: C

Rated PG-13: for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language

Running time: 171 minutes

In theaters