MOVIE REVIEW: FTN reviews Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Cast: Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Henry Cavill, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Baldwin
Running Time: 147 mins

Six films and an astonishing 22 years since Tom Cruise first decided to give the world his Americanised answer to James Bond, impressively, Ethan Hunt and co has left the MI6 agent shaken and stirred in its dust.

The series has remained consistently entertaining throughout.

Even its least impressive outing is still an engaging John Woo action fest. The genius in the evolution of the series has been the ability to feel completely self-contained while hinting at a larger narrative in a way the Craig Bonds have failed to.

The soft reboot with Ghost Protocol reinventing the series as a team driven stunt show of action and entertainment was a masterstroke: while Cruise is still very much front and centre, the additions of Pegg, Baldwin, Ferguson and Jeremy Renner (absent here as he was too busy not appearing in Avengers: Infinity War) have helped the 56-(how??)-year-old star with the heavy lifting and have added both stakes and humour to what would have worn out its welcome had the series continued with the one man wrecking crew narrative.

After a failed attempt to retrieve stolen plutonium, Hunt is forced to team up with CIA Hammer, Agent August Walker (Henry Cavill, with his infamous moustache) before a group of Da Vinci Code-esque terrorists known as the Apostles unleash a nuclear attack on the holy cities. As the first director to return, Christopher McQuarrie is offered a chance to expand on the series’ best entry, Rogue Nation. Here he hammers his leading man on all sides.

With the fallout (hey, cool idea for a title) of Hunt’s past heroics coming back to psychically and emotionally break him, McQuarrie uses this as an opportunity to not only get the best performance in the series from Cruise, but arguably the best action set pieces too: to call the Paris set piece “a car chase” and a bruising bathroom brawl “a fight”, would do a disservice to two truly inventive and original action scenes.

Fallout blends the best of the series: the double-crossing drama of the original and the bombastic action of the later entries into one beautiful cocktail.

But, it isn’t quite perfect.

The final action scene slips a bit too far into Looney Tunes territory to the point I half expected Cruise to whip out a brush and paint an escape tunnel for himself. The wrap up feels a bit too Mission: Convenient, considering the grave consequences that the film has set up.

That said, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a non-stop, adrenaline pumping, powerhouse of a film with action and excitement beyond compare. It exceeded all expectations. It is THE film of the summer.

4 out of 5 Nerds