It’s official. The Mission: Impossible series is modern cinema’s most dynamic action franchise. The latest installment, Mission: Impossible – Fallout roars past the competition, leaving furious street racers, galactic crusaders, and transforming robots in a cloud of dust. Director Christopher McQuarrie has performed a rare breed of popcorn flick alchemy. He took the decaying husk of a 22-year old series (based on a 50-year old TV show), pumped it full of rocket fuel, and fired it to the peak of action movie mountain. With an A-list star, dazzling visuals, and some of cinema’s most impressive stunt-work, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is an instant classic that audiences can’t afford to miss.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a plot-heavy film. And if you’ve seen the series’ past entries you’ll know huge chunks of each story is gobbledygook. Go here. Run there. Reconfigure this. Break that. The only real concern is setting up the next thrill and Fallout falls right in line. It begins with a dream sequence, where our hero, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) confronts his greatest fear. It’s a simple but effective pivot that alters the soul of these films going forward. He’s loyal to a fault. We’ve seen Ethan leap from buildings and dive out of planes but it’s this single character beat that brings him down to earth.

Fallout then plunges into a high-stakes mission where Ethan’s team must intercept materials required to make three nuclear bombs. Right on queue, the mission goes off the rails. It comes down to stopping the bad guys or saving a teammate and Ethan attempts the most Ethan move: save them both. He fails. The situation puts the components in the bad guys’ hands and leaves Ethan with a chip on his shoulder. Before he and his team head out and clean up their mess, they’re intercepted by Erica Sloan (Angela Bassett), a government higher-up looking to reign in his reckless behaviour. She assigns her own man, August Walker (Henry Cavill), to join the mission and keep tabs on Ethan. It doesn’t take long before the men butt heads, forcing Ethan to outsmart arms brokers, nuclear terrorists, and his own government.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout checks all the James Bond movie boxes with more style and flair than the recent Bond films. It takes everything the modern Bond films strive for – daring set-pieces, globe-hopping locations, and thrilling plots – and raises the bar. McQuarrie put together a guaranteed entry into the all-time-great action movie pantheon. Fallout is gripping from beginning to end, shows off stunning international locales, and features the highest level of spectacle you’ll find in a blockbuster (outside of CGI-heavy Marvel movies).

Fallout takes the best bits from great action flicks and merges them into an action movie Voltron. There’s a hand-to-hand brawl inside a washroom that’s as intense as they come. The slick editing, ninja-like fight choreography, and ear-crunching sound effects create a sequence evocative of Hong Kong action movies. And once viewers catch their breath it’s onto a nail-biting heist scene that shares the white-knuckle intensity and surgical precision of Michael Mann’s Heat and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Those are massive shoes to fill and Mission: Impossible – Fallout does so without coming off as a pale imitator. McQuarrie packs his film with intricate and explosive sequences that would be the climax of lesser movies.

McQuarrie adheres to a strict filmmaking recipe, one that’s easy to copy but tough to pull off. Sure, he has a soul-rattling score, razor sharp edits, and majestic vistas to grab our attention. But it’s the well-placed twists and turns that hold our attention hostage. McQuarrie elaborately charts the action with a series of setups, payoffs, and reversals. For a guy who spends all his time devising elaborate plans, it’s funny how nothing Ethan Hunt does goes according to plan. If he jumps from a plane you can bet something goes wrong before his parachute opens. Each mission becomes a sequence of twists, turns, and reversals that force Ethan to think on the fly. And it’s that ensuing chaos that makes the movie a beginning-to-end thrill ride.

We can talk about Fallout’s insane stunts all day but they aren’t what makes this movie work (but they do go a long way). This entry finds a more satisfying balance between the characters, their relationships, and the action. For most of the previous five films, the characters took a back seat to the Mission: Impossible brand itself. Benji (Simon Pegg) began as a bit of comic relief and blossomed into an integral member of the team. He’s no longer reserved to hunkering down in rooms with computers barking orders to Ethan. And Luther’s (Ving Rhames) appearances in most of the series felt more like an obligation to continuity than an essential part of the film. Here, not only does he stick around for the entire film, Rhames gets enough runway to unleash his considerable acting chops and he delivers a tender moment that drives the film’s main theme home.

But it’s Ethan that we’re all here to see and Cruise takes the character above and beyond what we expect of the character (physically and emotionally). In Fallout, Ethan’s past haunts him as he struggles with sticking to his values and doing what his job requires (the greater good). Ethan and his team wrestle with this notion throughout the film. McQuarrie visually manifests this conflict in a three-way fight where one character must decide between saving a strangling friend or vanquishing a foe. The series is built on watching Ethan run, jump, and fight but Fallout is the first time I’ve empathized with Ethan and what he’s fighting for. In the past, Ethan was a vehicle driving me from action beat to action beat. But now, Cruise does more than inhabit a hero bent on saving the world. In Fallout, he breathes life into a character with values I admire.

In the past, I stopped thinking about Ethan and his perilous life as soon as the credits rolled. Fallout adds a new wrinkle to the formula. By humanizing him and emphasizing his heroic ideals the film ups the emotional stakes. Now, I’m more than invested in Ethan Hunt, I care about the character. That’s a wonderful hook for a movie with so many aspects to enjoy. I could go on and on about the splashy cinematography that would be right at home in a music video. Or the insane level of technical precision that went into setting up each major stunt. Or how we’re blessed with another ultra-badass performance by Rebecca Ferguson. And I would still be underselling this picture. So I’ll say this: If you love going to the movies and you’re looking for a film that deserves your $15, there’s no better choice than Mission: Impossible – Fallout.