Pretty much everything is terrible right now, but at least there’s some wild, bravura blockbuster filmmaking either clueless or sly enough to try and make us forget that. Mission: Impossible — Fallout (opening July 27) is about anarchists trying to fix the world by destroying it, and yet these dark questions about civilization’s survival are met with bright and cracking wit. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie ratchets his movie—and the M:I franchise—up to a mad pitch, then revels in a whirling, controlled-chaos unraveling. In ragged times, the sophisticated derring-do of Fallout is a welcome gift, a slick and studio-polished adventure that nonetheless has the undermining wink of transgression. The movie’s nerve and moxie successfully make us forget its corporate overlords, and all those other oligarchs grinding millions of American lives into nothing.

Whew! That got a little dark. Which conversations about Fallout shouldn’t, really. The movie is a full-tilt blast, a direct sequel to 2015’s Rogue Nation that rewards a familiarity with that film but also knows that its plot’s chief function is to deliver grand set pieces. Which isn’t to say the movie is without narrative weight. It’s just that whatever details from the last one you’ve forgotten or never knew to begin with are quickly smoothed away. True to the medium, the movie almost never stops, well, moving—and in that aerodynamic charge a coherent enough plot takes shape, one that has Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) examining the nature of his commitment to all this world-saving, while pretty much everyone around him regards him as the lunatic he is.

But what a dependable lunatic. Who could have guessed that the Mission: Impossible franchise, of all the franchises, would have such staying power, somehow getting better as it aged. In expanding its scope beyond the original film’s gizmo tradecraft, the series surely should have become too similar to every other bloated, idea-less action spectacular. And yet through canny choices in directors—J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, now McQuarrie—the franchise has found a surprising creative groove, toying with physics in an amiable game of one-upmanship that has yielded dazzling results. In Fallout, Cruise—whose devotion to stunt work is as crucial to these films as anything else—jumps out of a high-altitude plane and hangs from a helicopter as it whips over the mountains of Kashmir, daring us to consider that his work on these films might only be finished when one of them actually kills him. (This one nearly did.) Cruise’s crazy gusto dovetails neatly with Ethan Hunt’s, and Fallout runs swiftly, as the franchise has, on those twin engines of intensity.

The trailers for Fallout have largely showcased the helicopter stuff, which is a beguiling and ludicrous bit of action filmmaking. But I’m even more enamored of what comes before, particularly an extended sequence set in sunny, springtime Paris, a long kidnapping and pursuit that is remarkable for how deceptively lo-fi and simple it is. McQuarrie doesn’t introduce anything new to the chase scene, exactly, but he stages one with tireless verve, pushing the scene past its seemingly natural ending and then again past that. We’re giddy and exhausted by the time the thing has concluded, only to be swept up in the movie’s next exhilarating clause, which is nothing more or less exciting than Tom Cruise running across the rooftops of London. He’s the best runner in movies, and Fallout is wise to give his tight little stride its proper due.

There’s a sense of Christopher Nolan’s macro dramatics at work in Fallout. McQuarrie films with a gliding insistence similar to much of The Dark Knight’s looming urban warfare, and Lorne Balfe’s score swells and thrums and booms in similarly epic proportions. He’s an acolyte of Nolan familiar Hans Zimmer, a fact you can hear in every chord that approaches “bwaaamp.”