Cruising into his best Mission yet
Mission: Impossible – Fallout Cert: 12A 2hrs 27mins ★★★★★
Tom Cruise may be 56 and not look entirely like Tom Cruise any more – don’t worry, Tom, I’m sure it’s just a trick of the lighting – but he can still churn out a cracking action-thriller, as the latest instalment from the apparently endless Mission: Impossible franchise (now 22 years and six films old) shows. With three spectacular – and often hilarious – chase sequences and some topnotch female casting, it’s the best Mission: Impossible film since… well, since the last one, because that was very good too.
The masterstroke, however, is the belated introduction of some continuity to the series, each instalment of which has hitherto stood pretty much alone. Not only is Mission: Impossible – Fallout effectively a sequel to 2015’s Rogue Nation but a key character, last seen in 2011, makes an emotional return to leaven the inevitable crash, bang, wallop and increasing silliness of the genuinely cliff-hanging finale.
Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie, who also made Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher with Cruise, has clearly established a good working relationship with the Hollywood star, who seems to be taking himself just a little less seriously these days.
It’s important not to take the plot of these things too seriously either, what with three missing spheres of weapons-grade plutonium, a shadowy group known as Apostles, the even shadowier figure of ‘John Lark’, and a woman known as the ‘White Widow’. Only Ethan Hunt (Cruise), head of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF), feels at home in this sort of company.
The action is as peripatetic as ever, beginning in Berlin, where Ethan, Benji (the much-improved Simon Pegg) and franchise original Luther (Ving Rhames) manage to lose the plutonium spheres, apparently because Ethan has apparently never considered the
famous philosophical dilemma: is it better to sacrifice one life if, in so doing, you save the life of thousands of others? I’d have thought that was basic international spy stuff. But put on the bullet-splattered spot, Ethan gets the answer wrong, which means he and the team can spend the next twoand-a-quarter hours trying to get them back and generally whizzing around Paris, London and somewhere mountainous on the India/China border.
Working out who the baddies and goodies are, however, has rarely been harder. Hunt, it turns out, might just be a baddie; Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), hitherto the IMF’s political nemesis, seems to have become a goodie; and as for the CIA, surely goodies to the core? Well, I don’t trust either head honcho Erica Sloan (Angela Bassett) or the big muscly agent (Henry Cavill) she’s insisted comes along to keep the IMF in check.
As for Ilsa Faust (the excellent Rebecca Ferguson), the double agent who returns after Rogue Nation and who, in less enlightened times, I once described as ‘the best spy-candy since Eva Green in Casino Royale’, she changes sides more often than Benji changes facial prosthetics.
But there’s no mistaking the terrorist and anarchist Solomon Lane, so splendidly played by Sean Harris. He was a villainous baddie in Rogue Nation and he stays a villainous baddie, albeit now in custody, in Fallout.
Vanessa Kirby makes an electrifying genre debut as the White Widow, managing to convey in just a few sizzling scenes that she is mad, bad and definitely dangerous to know. Yes, I know it slightly spoils things that she’s got the hots for a character played by an actor (Cruise) a mere 26 years her senior but these things change slowly in Hollywood. At times, McQuarrie’s plot does get a bit bogged down in the fine detail, but there’s so much to fit in. Rhames, who, along with Cruise is the only survivor from the 1996 original, is rewarded with more to do, a major character bows out and, of course, there’s that emotional return of a familiar face. But it’s the action sequences that franchise fans treasure. A motorbike chase in Paris seems to go on for ever; a rooftop London pursuit (in which Cruise broke an ankle – and, yes, that distinctly painful-looking footage is used) is both terrific and funny; and as for the helicopter chase in the foothills of the Himalayas, it’s got to be the best cinematic cliffhanger since… well, Cliffhanger in 1993.
Enjoy!
‘Effectively a sequel to Rogue Nation… and a key character returns to add extra crash, bang, wallop’