Mission: Impossible – Fallout
It’s far from my favorite modern movie franchise, but there’s no questioning that the “Mission: Impossible” franchise starring and produced by Tom Cruise over the past 22 years has been one of the most consistently-managed, and consistently-entertaining, blockbuster series Hollywood has delivered. A big part of that, I think, has been Cruise finding interesting filmmakers to work with each time out, with only one director returning to the series (which we’ll discuss later), but it’s also because you get the impression that Cruise has genuine affection for the original Bruce Geller TV series it sprang from, and that Cruise will be perfectly content doing them until he dies (maybe even during production) so long as he can keep pushing himself with new stunts to blow our damn fool minds with. I may not think highly of Cruise as an individual (though he’s still a fantastic actor), but his Ethan Hunt is one of the coolest customers in modern movies.
I really should have reviewed 2015’s “Rogue Nation” when I rewatched it a few weeks ago leading up to “Fallout,” since the new film is a direct sequel for writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s debut to the franchise, but I will get to it, at some point. McQuarrie returning for a second film is one of the anomalies in “Fallout,” but that’s because of the fact that Cruise and he are picking up where “Rogue Nation” left off in introducing The Syndicate, a terrorist organization that takes its name from the show, and bringing back the former MI-6 agent in charge of it, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), after Hunt and his IMF team captured him at the end of the last film. When the film starts, Hunt is in Belfast when he gets his mission for this film- an offshoot of The Syndicate called The Apostles is trying to buy plutonium for nuclear weapons which Hunt is to retrieve before they can. Unfortunately, at a key moment in the buy Hunt has a choice, and that choice not only puts his IMF team under scrutiny, but also puts the world at risk of multiple nuclear explosions that could destabilize existence unlike anything since the end of WWII.
After John Woo’s 2000 entry and J.J. Abrams’s 2006 film, this series couldn’t have felt more like Cruise’s ego writ large to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on the big screen- probably the most gratuitous vanity project any actor had set in front of a movie camera. (And yes, that is including fellow Scientologist John Travolta’s appalling “Battlefield Earth.”) After Brad Bird brought his love of spy craft, and talent for spectacle, to 2011’s “Ghost Protocol,” and McQuarrie delivered a strongly-scripted follow-up to that in “Rogue Nation,” though, while Cruise will always put his Hunt front-and-center of the action every time, he brought the notion of Hunt being more than a one-person team back to the series (though Abrams helped nudge the series back in that direction), and the resulting films have felt like there’s considerably more going on than just the next “WTF?” stunt Cruise decides to do himself. I love that Ving Rhames’s Luther has been brought back throughout the series, and his interactions with Hunt, and about Hunt, point to a real bond between the characters that goes back to when Hunt broke into the CIA in Brian DePalma’s fantastic original film. And how happy can I be for the continued presence of Simon Pegg’s Benji in this series since the third film? Like Luther, Ethan has continually brought Benji back into the field with him because of not just his abilities with technology that compliment Luther’s, but because Ethan trusts him with the task at hand. And like Rhames, Pegg is just Pegg, and that’s fine, but it’s interesting to see him play Benji relatively straight compared to the more comedic roles he is known for. Benji isn’t just comic relief, but someone who takes the job seriously, and humor just comes out of that. These three make for a strong team.
As the film continues McQuarrie’s story from “Rogue Nation,” Lane is not the only one returning for this film. Alec Baldwin’s Alan Hunley is now Hunt’s boss at IMF, and his scenes bring a lot of exposition to the party, but the big return to the show is Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, an MI-6 agent who had infiltrated The Syndicate in “Rogue Nation,” and had to work closely with Hunt to capture Lane. Now, she is back in the game, but while her fate continues to be tied to Lane, it’s in a different way as it was before, and once again, she finds herself having to rely on Hunt more than she would hope, and Ferguson is a terrific foil for Cruise as he has to figure out a way to not only recover the plutonium but also keep Lane from reeking havoc after he and Walker, a brutal CIA assassin played by Henry Cavill, have to infiltrate the inner circle of the White Widow, played by Vanessa Kirby. Walker is sent with Hunt to keep tabs on him, and Cavill probably has his best performance to date in a major film under McQuarrie’s watchful eye, and playing opposite Cruise. The man is a physical beast to be reckoned with, and there’s a hand-to-hand fight Walker and Hunt are engaged in while in a restroom that is one of the most physically exhausting action beats in any “Mission: Impossible” movie, and the movie has barely gotten started, by that point.
The big attraction of each “Impossible” film, at this point, becomes the wild things Cruise will do in terms of doing his own stunt work, and in his mid-50s, the actor is still willing to risk death for our entertainment, and it’s both batshit insane, and kind of awesome. But while the high-altitude jump out of a plane and the hanging on to a rope and entering a helicopter that happens in this movie are pretty awesome to watch (although for my money, the film’s flaws come through in the overlong helicopter chase, and death-defying fight on a plateau that reminds one of “Cliffhanger,” that cap the movie), it’s the lower-tech action that really left me breathless in this movie. The restroom brawl is the first piece of action I loved watching, along with a prison break Ethan and Walker are involved in later, but there’s a foot chase that Ethan engages in that is as exciting as anything this franchise has ever put on film. It has Cruise going up stairs, jumping from one building to another, and trying to catch up with his mark as best he can, and the way McQuarrie shoots the scene with cinematographer Rob Hardy, edits it with Eddie Hamilton, and allows Lorne Balfe to score it, leaves us excited as it brings us to a surprising, and shockingly emotional, final stretch of the film that raises the stakes considerably. That last stretch kind of hampers what is an otherwise fantastic action thriller from being the very best entry in this franchise, in my opinion, but it can’t stop it from being one of the finest examples of action cinema in the past decade, nonetheless.
