You don’t often see this in movies, but most spies have to be boring to be good at their jobs.

In the 2006 J.J. Abrams-directed Mission: Impossible III, Tom Cruise’s alter ego, superspy Ethan Hunt, has retired from mask-pulls and gymnastic infiltrations. Yet his job remains so black bag that even his beautiful physician fiancée thinks he’s a desk jockey for the Virginia Transportation Department. In an early party scene, he gives us a brief soliloquy, delivered with Cruise’s patented help-me-help-you rectitude, about traffic patterns: “It’s amazing. It’s like a living organism.”

He is doing this because he knows it will bore the couple’s guests to tears, pre-empting any further questions about how he makes his living. Even if you’re as fully in the tank for the now-eight-films-deep Mission: Impossible saga as I am, you might not remember this scene. But I adored it then and I adore it still, because my long-retired dad, who spent his entire career at the Federal Highway Administration, actually says stuff like this all the time.

For almost three decades, the Mission: Impossible franchise has offered weird and mutable portrayals of official Washington — a place that has never felt more weird or mutable than it does now — and had a lot to say about the more prosaic, less secret parts of the Federal Government. As Cruise dreams up beyond-dangerous stunts, performs them himself and nearly dies for our amusement, as he scales the world’s tallest building or clings to the fuselage of an Airbus A400M or, in the new and possibly conclusive Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which opened to a series-best $63 million at the domestic box office over Memorial Day weekend, dukes it out with an enemy astride, atop and beneath an open-cockpit 1930s Boeing Stearman biplane 10,000 feet over South Africa, it’s easy to forget these are movies about federal workers.

For anyone unfamiliar with the 29-year-old spy franchise, a brief primer: Tom Cruise was an Academy Award-nominated box-office draw who had spent about a dozen years working with most of the top film-makers in Hollywood when he chose to produce and star in a big-screen follow-up to the TV show he had loved as a child. The Impossible Mission Force is an imaginary espionage agency that uses gaslighting and uncannily convincing rubber masks as an alternative military force — a government instrument so secret that even the director of national intelligence hasn’t been read in. “IMF?” he asks in the 2023 instalment, Dead Reckoning. “The International Monetary Fund?” I don’t know how this joke played elsewhere, but it killed it at an advance screening at AMC’s Georgetown location. “They’re not ones to take orders in a traditional sense,” another intelligence officer says. “We more or less … leave word.” Talk about the “deep state”!

This franchise, the most reliably thrilling of the 21st century by my grappling-hook-equipped wristwatch, once had at least some tenuous grounding in reality. In the first film, directed by Brian De Palma, Jim Phelps — Hunt’s boss, played by Jon Voight, now the White House’s “special ambassador” to Hollywood — broke bad, had Hunt’s team-mates killed, and tried to frame Hunt for these high crimes and misdemeanours. Phelps was not content with the reward of a life in the spy game: “A lousy marriage and $62,000 a year.” Meanwhile, he grouses, “you wake up one morning and find out the President is running the country without your permission. How dare he?” However exotic their line of work, Phelps and Hunt were ultimately just a couple of fed-up feds.

In those earlier movies, the IMF looks more or less like a normal government department, with an office, a staff, pay grades listed in their files and possibly tell-us-five-things-you-did-this week e-mails. There are Senate oversight committees, and higher-ups who are forever being proved wrong; there is paperwork and inter-agency infighting. For Hunt to clear his name after his mentor’s betrayal, he had to break into CIA headquarters in Langley and yoink a list of undercover spooks Phelps had been conspiring to procure and sell. (I’m sorry to tell you that wasn’t filmed in Virginia but at a studio in London. Likewise, very little of the third movie’s most bracing DC set-piece, a helicopter and drone attack on an IMF convoy as it’s crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, was shot on this coast.)

Dead Reckoning radically altered our understanding of who the IMF members are: Hunt, we learn, was once accused of murder! Falsely, of course, but still. Because of his oft-demonstrated, ever-expanding skill set, he was offered induction into the IMF as an alternative to a life sentence. I don’t know how you square that with the fact that Simon Pegg’s character, Benji Dunn, had an office job at the IMF in Mission Impossible III, but was promoted by the time of Ghost Protocol, in 2011, because he had passed the field agent exam. But the evolving depiction of the IMF from underpaid professionals with top-secret clearance to felons with no other way out seems to have anticipated the way those in power would choose to paint the federal workforce, with their specialised expertise and their unsexy salaries, as a rogue nation.

The Final Reckoning takes this extended metaphor to its illogical conclusion. With a 72-hour deadline to prevent Armageddon, the President grants Hunt the use of both the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush and the submarine USS Ohio. It’s a seeming admission that these conventional — albeit nuclear-powered — military assets and a situation room full of flag officers and Cabinet officials are useless without an instinctive, floppy-haired renegade to command them. We’re told — and told, and told — that there are threats Hunt alone can stop, that he has “a destiny that touches every living thing”, that without him “the Earth would be a very different place. It might not even be here at all”. Hunt has become a Chosen One, fully messianic, capable of doing what no official or government can. Clearly, the border between Ethan Hunt, obsessive-and-possibly-insane spy, and Tom Cruise, obsessive-and-possibly-insane movie star, is microns-thin and highly porous. But what’s good for fiction is rarely good for our government.

Action films in particular have always privileged the lone wolf, the loose cannon who punches harder and knows better than all the hand-wringing Ivy Leaguers and prevaricating survey-readers who doubt him — and sometimes her. You know the ones I mean. “Dirty” Harry Callahan, Ellen Ripley, John McClane and of course that highly irregular-but-utterly-essential asset of (now) His Majesty’s Government, James Bond, are all instinctive, decisive and solitary. (Ian Fleming’s Bond novels leant into 007’s status as a government employee, noting details like his salary and what in-office duties he was on the hook for when not trading quips across long dining tables with evil spacefaring billionaires. The movies never found much use for this material.) Unaccountability has been the little-examined default of action cinema at least since the shoot-’em-ups of the Eighties displaced the conspiracy thrillers of the Seventies.

Movies such as these were utterly, embarrassingly formative for me. Even more so for others, evidently, given how contemptuous our government and much of our electorate have become of education, consensus, collaboration or expertise. Our highest-ranking leader is a man who has told us he goes with his gut, never admits error, never changes his world view based on new intel, never looks back. He is unburdened by introspection or shame. Asked if he is responsible for upholding the Constitution, the President answers, “I don’t know.”

Of course, plausible deniability is the IMF’s prime directive. Briefings include the famous phrase, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it,” meaning agents can say no. But once they say yes, they’re on their own: if IMF agents are captured or killed in the line of duty, the Government will “disavow all knowledge” of their actions. The oversight-averse, just-trust-us position that has long been the implicit belief of the all-knowing and yet all-knowledge-disavowing force behind Mission: Impossible has become official government policy.

I choose not to accept it.

• Chris Klimek is a film critic in Washington