Film review: Mission Impossible: Fallout
MANILA, Philippines — If the mission of every Mission Impossible (MI) film is to do better than the previous entry, then the very latest, Fallout, can pat itself on the back for coming up trumps. It’s hard to believe that the very first film of the franchise came out in 1996, and that 22 years later, in the sixth installment, we still have 56-year-old Tom Cruise throwing himself off buildings and turning his Ethan Hunt body into a battering ram. But that he does with reckless abandon, all in pursuit of making us give up one more gasp or shake of the head.
For the first time in the franchise’s history, they’ve also brought back a director, Christopher McQuarrie of 2015’s MI — Rogue Nation. Christopher has also worked with Tom on Edge of Tomorrow and Jack Reacher films, so it’s safe to presume that Tom was more than ready to collaborate with Christopher and bring the MI franchise to uncharted territory.
The storyline basically has to do with three plutonium cores that Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) is plotting to acquire and utilize to bring about wanton destruction. Besides Sean Harris, the cast includes Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Michelle Monaghan, Alec Baldwin and Rebecca Ferguson reprising the roles they played in previous MI outings. New to the franchise and introduced in Fallout are Henry Cavill and Angela Bassett as CIA officers, and Vanessa Kirby as White Widow, a black market arms dealer.
More than the plutonium cores, the film is a never-ending game of double and triple-cross, of betrayals and tests of loyalties. And caught smack dab in the middle of all this is Ethan Hunt, whose very motives for accepting these missions are put into question. And naturally, there are the action sequences — and what sequences they are!
We get so spoiled nowadays with all those superhero films and their CGI-enhanced action scenes, that we tend to forget that what those CGI-assisted scenes are trying to emulate and stretch are the most outrageous, believable action scenes. So strap your seats and get ready to be treated to the wildest, natural, stunt-men scenes to hit the screen.
From sky jumps to street chases, from hand-to-hand fighting in a men’s toilet to incredible dueling helicopter scenes, and of course, as can be expected, Tom running. It’s been said that to make a Tom Cruise film succeed you have to make him run, as he does it so cinematically. And so we get that here, but just that he’s doing it on top of London buildings, and not on ground level.
I can’t say how much of the stunt work is actually Tom, and how much are done by stunt men — but regardless of the division of labor, you have to commend them for really upping the ante here, and to Christopher for creating the craziest camera angles to capture it all. Who knows if there’ll be a seventh MI film, but for what it’s worth, if Fallout ends up being the last one, it’s one terrific calling card to have left on the table.