Wing walking is an art older than sound cinema. Before movies included spoken dialogue, they were already filled with daredevils who risked — and sometimes lost — their lives performing incredible feats in and on top of airplanes. So when producer/star Tom Cruise and producer/co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie turned the climax of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning into maybe the greatest display of wing walking and aerial stunt work in the last 50 years, that’s wasn’t a haphazard choice. It was a decision designed to further the mission of this franchise for the last three decades: To thrill moviegoers with old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle on the grandest scale possible.

It’s impossible for me to give a negative review to a movie with a climax as good as the one that concludes The Final Reckoning; Cruise hanging off a biplane hundreds of feet in the air is more than worth the price of ission all by itself. But it’s also possible that the rest of The Final Reckoning is a mess, and ranks near the bottom of this long-running franchise.

Full review at ScreenCrush.