The new ‘Mission: Impossible’: Choose to accept it
The terrorists’ manifesto in the spiffy new “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” hinges its action plan for global slaughter on the phrase “the greater the suffering, the greater the peace.” So cruel. And yet so applicable to the ways of the action franchise!
In his sixth round as Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt, certified movie star Tom Cruise, 56 but fully in Dorian Gray mode, has never suffered more grievous bodily harm. Nor has he risked his neck more flagrantly than in the trademark death-defiance on view here. Some of it’s pleasingly old school in its reliance on formidable stunt work. Enough
of it, though, gets a digital effects assist for the amazements to scale the heights of plausibility and then leap, like a gazelle, to the adjacent mountain of sublime ridiculousness.
Helicopters play chicken inside a snowy ravine in Kashmir. In Paris, Cruise motorcycles the wrong way (which, in movie terms, is very much the right way) around the Arc de Triomphe while dozens of stunt drivers duck and dodge. In London, Cruise sprints after his prey along a hazardous rooftop route near the Tate museum, and it’s like the fastest-ever walking tour of a major world capital, requiring the most number of insurance waivers.
FYI, the movie’s really good. The technical finesse, sleek assurance and reassuring grooves of director Christopher McQuarrie’s second “M:I” assignment, following “Rogue Nation,” come with just enough twists in the narrative to justify 147 minutes of summer movie.
McQuarrie wrote the script as well as directed it. Three plutonium cores have gone missing, and if they end up in the hands of the rogue terrorism cadre known as the Apostles, bad news. The glaring anarchist from “Rogue Nation,” played by Sean Harris, remains Hunt's chief adversary. Other key figures in the previous McQuarrie “M:I” film return, notably Hunt's sometime sort-of lover, assassin Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). The IMF team leader is again played, with droll inscrutability, by Alec Baldwin.
Ving Rhames and his hat are back; like Cruise, they've been there since the first movie, the one directed by Brian De Palma back in 1996. (Bruce Geller's hit TV series, debuting in 1966, started it all.) The film's gratifyingly paced opening finds Hunt under fire, and juggling ruses, with Luther (Rhames, always in the van, that guy) and techno-wonk Benji (Simon Pegg, more subdued this time out).
In the first shootout Hunt makes a crucial decision revealing his vulnerability. From there “Fallout” keeps falling out or, rather, hurtling forward, rolling in new characters. Angela Bassett is the CIA director, ready to hang Hunt out to dry at a moment's notice. Her pet assassin is played by Henry Cavill, the movies' current Superman.
He's not what you'd call an enlivener; Cavill's a block of wood, actually, unable to make a single line of dialogue sound either enjoyably fake or plausibly human. Yet as the movie twists and turns, the tetchy relationship established between Cavill's gun-for-hire and Cruise's Hunt lends “Fallout” a secondary source of tension. These competitive fellows HALO-jump out of a plane; they battle a deft antagonist (Liang Yang) inside a men's room stall (!), and then outside of it, in the Paris Palais. Also, Michelle Monaghan returns as Hunt's eternal beloved, reminding him what it's all for.
McQuarrie piles on the mayhem like a boss. His “M:I” films exude class, intelligent expense and giddy expansiveness in equal measure. He makes the mistake, I think, of amping up the violence in the final round (the box office will likely disagree). The stunts really are enough without the cranes to the cranium and that sort of thing. On balance I prefer “Rogue Nation,” but this one's a walloping success on its own. And there are tasty details, such as Kristoffer Joner (as a mad Norwegian scientist) cackling in closeup, or “The Crown's” Vanessa Kirby slinking around as the “White Widow,” an arms broker with an exceptional sense of style.