Mission: impossible – FalloUt
Cruise gets to the chopper…
Cruise’s latest really, really, really difficult mission.
There have been five previous Mission: Impossible movies, each fashioned by a different director who’s been actively encouraged to bring his signature style to the franchise (hiring a female filmmaker seems to be the most impossible mission of all). Fallout breaks from this admirable quest for freshness, with Christopher McQuarrie, the director of fifth instalment Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, returning to the chair, perhaps indicating that producer/ star Tom Cruise is this time ready to play it safe.
No chance. McQuarrie has no interest in repeating the elegant storytelling and suspenseful set-pieces that brought sophistication to Rogue Nation. Fallout is a more sprawling, chaotic affair, crashing from Belfast to Berlin to Paris to London to Kashmir in a flurry of action that punctuates a narrative so twisty it doesn’t so much spin heads as snap necks.
The plot involves our IMF hero Ethan Hunt (Cruise) being given 72 measly hours to grab three nuclear cores heading to The Apostles, a splinter cell of terrorists set up by Rogue Nation baddie Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). Hunt and his teammates Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) botch the job with terrible consequences: nukes go off in Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca. And so Hunt goes into action again, this time with CIA watchdog Walker (Henry Cavill, all muscles, malignancy and moustache).
Hunt’s first task is to cosy up to arms dealer White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), and then… well, best you take the journey for yourselves to discover how the dizzying plot accommodates players old (Harris’ anarchist Lane, Rebecca Ferguson’s MI6 agent Ilsa, Alec Baldwin’s government honcho Alan Hunley) and new (Angela Bassett’s CIA chief Erica Sloan, Liang Yang’s fist-flinging terrorist, Kristoffer Joner’s nuclear-weapons expert Nils Debruuk). There are double, triple, quadruple crosses… Whenever Ethan mutters, “I’ll figure it out,” he’s referring to the perilous stunts he has to tackle, but viewers could apply his catchphrase to the thrillingly clever story.
And those stunts... wow, just wow. Impossibly dangerous set-pieces have always been this franchise’s mission, with MI:I’s chopper-in-the-Chunnel collision, MI:II’s cliff-face dangle, MI:III’s bridge battle, MI:IV’s Burj Khalifa climb and MI:V’s plane-clinging takeoff raising the bar for action cinema. Well, MI:VI serves up belter after corker, from a stomach-knotting Halo jump to knuckle-whitening motorbike and car chases to Cruise, the greatest sprinter in the movies, propelling himself up, around and over St. Paul’s Cathedral, then past Tower Bridge and up to the very summit of the Tate Modern. Hollywood’s leading man does it all himself, naturally, even breaking an ankle during one full-pelt leap. He also – madly, unbelievably – pilots a chopper in the climactic kamikaze pursuit.
Add in humour and exploratory emotion as Hunt, hitherto a cipher, gets to exhibit a little soul beneath the superspy, and you have, improbably, the finest Mission yet. You’d be crazy not to accept it. Jamie Graham
THE VERDICT
Director Christopher McQuarrie brings grace and grit, and star Tom Cruise brings it, period. This quickwitted, fleet-footed franchise shows no sign of flagging.