ETHAN Mission: Impossible Fallout
Advancing years can’t stop Tom’s
ANDY’S RATING: ★★★★★
ROGER Moore was 56 when he chased Grace Jones up the Eiffel Tower in A View To A Kill.
Smart editing couldn’t quite hide the fact he was panting rather heavily, so it came as no surprise when it was announced it would be his final Bond film.
If you saw that painful YouTube footage of Cruise breaking his ankle on the set of this sixth Mission: Impossible movie, you may have wondered if this will be his last outing as super-spy Ethan Hunt.
Could the action man, who also turned 56 a couple of weeks ago, be finally feeling his age?
It doesn’t take long for the film to provide an answer. In the first big sequence, Cruise leaps out of a C-17 transport plane at 25,000 ft, skydives through a lightning storm and lands on the glass roof of a Paris club.
Minutes later he is engaged in a bruisingly authentic three-way fist fight in the toilets with Superman star Henry Cavill and martial arts master Liang Yang.
The eye-popping action scenes begin to pile up. In Paris, Cruise hops on a motorbike to take part in one of the most stunning chases since The French Connection.
In London we see him jump off the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral and make a series of death-defying (and in reality, ankle-breaking) rooftop leaps to reach the Tate Modern gallery.
By the final reel he is hanging on to the landing gear of a helicopter weaving among the snowy peaks of the Himalayas.
There are no signs of CGI and you can’t imagine where they could have placed a safety net.
This is extreme action cinema, using real locations, physical stunts and one supremely fit, but mentally questionable, movie star.
It’s not just the action scenes that make this the blockbuster of the year. You don’t need to have seen the previous instalment Rogue Nation to enjoy it, but fans should enjoy how director Christopher McQuarrie’s clever script forges little links with earlier instalments.
The face-switching masks return and are entrusted to Hunt’s comedy sidekick Benji (Simon Pegg).
Michelle Monaghan’s Julia, who Hunt wed in Mission: Impossible III, also makes a welcome comeback. That film began with Philip Seymour Hoffman putting a gun to Julia’s head and asking Ethan to choose between her and the rest of the human race.
Here, a similar moral dilemma instigates the plot. Ethan must decide whether to save his comrade Luther (Ving Rhames) or prevent three globes of nuclear material getting into the hands of The Apostles, the terrorist group headed up by the the previous film’s archcriminal Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). Ethan plumps for his old mucker, leaving the world facing annihilation (again).
To get the nukes back he must work with Cavill’s hulking CIA agent August Walker, team up with a femme fatale called the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) and track down shadowy figure John Lark. The mission, which he chooses to accept, also piques the interest of MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who has unfinished business with Ethan