Tripwire Reviews Mission Impossible – Fallout

First off, let’s deal with the constant big white elephant in the room: why do so many people actively dislike or even loathe Tom Cruise? I assume much of it is because of his well publicised addiction…err…I mean commitment to Scientology. Well, if that’s the case, most logical and conscientious people should already know how bad Scientology is, whoever follows it. But what about the zillions of other pseudo-religious, exploitative corporations and their nutjob followers out there? Why pick on Tom Cruise, in particular, if you aren’t going to go after all those other misguided crazies, too? Besides; Hollywood itself isn’t exactly pure as the driven snow when it comes to parameters of (im)morality and what Cruise gets up to in his personal life should have little or no bearing on his screen presence. So I, for one, will hereby state that he is currently one of the best action-blockbuster stars around, whichever damn God he prays to, every bedtime. You really get the feeling that he puts his heart and soul into every frame of the film – even if he isn’t the most accomplished or subtle actor around. And he certainly takes enough physical risks on such grueling shoots, doing a lot of his own stunts; most other actor-producers would get the stunt double to fill-in, or let the special effects team fudge it in post-production, so give him a break, why don’t ya?

Now that’s out of the way, here we have the sixth installment in the Mission Impossible franchise: since the reboot of the classic 1960s TV series began in 1996, the films have wavered between average, good and positively thrilling, with the last few getting progressively better, in many ways. Indeed, ‘Rogue Nation’, the 2015 episode in the ongoing escapades of espionage agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) was the best one yet, building up to a more regular, connected roster of characters, themes and storylines – continued in this one – with the laconic humour of Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) offsetting the sometimes over-egged action sequences with a nice line in witty sarcasm, and undercover MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) adding some much needed female zest and gutsy sexiness to proceedings.

Rogue Nation was one of the most spectacular action blockbusters of recent years, closely snapping at the heels of all those barnstorming Daniel Craig Bond movies, so there was a lot to live up to in Fallout, but it…ahem…falls a little bit short of its predecessor, even though it is still – in general – a visceral eye candy blast, from start to finish.

I won’t try and explain, in detail, the dauntingly convoluted story, or we will be here for the next 20 years; this one is replete with so many plot twists, double crosses, counter-plot twists, shock reveals and counter-counter-plot twists that it ends up traveling up its own veritable backside within 2/3rds of the film’s running time. However, if you are willing to suspend your disbelief – which you already should have done, after the first few death-defying stunts in the opening moments of the film – and treat the plot mainly as a coat hanger on which to festoon high-octane spasms of kinetic motion and bone crunching violence, then you will enjoy a rip-roaring, wild ride. In other words, War and Peace this ain’t, thus ‘genre context’ must be applied.

Suffice to say that, this time, the story is a development of the threads left hanging at the end of Rogue Nation, focusing around the terrorist organisation the Syndicate, which is in cahoots with rogue anarchist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who is masterminding a Bond-villain type objective to explode three plutonium nuclear bombs around the world in order to hold the world to ransom and kick-start a new world order, whilst Hunt, and various in-fighting factions, attempt to track him down. Got that? And that’s just a precis. Also returning are ex-MI6 agent Ilsa (Ferguson), along with her own secretive agenda, and IMF colleagues and buddies Benji (Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), and Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), among others. Added into the mix, and hence more sinewy plot strands, are newcomers August Walker (Henry Cavill), a mysterious CIA operative, and the ‘White Widow’ (Vanessa Kirby), a beautiful, wealthy fashionista, and part-time arms dealer. Even Hunt’s ex-wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) shows up towards the end, subtly, but rather cheesily, professing her undying love for Hunt, who’s ultimately had to sacrifice their marriage for the job of saving the world every other week.

But, apart from this final note of lachrymose tackiness, and a certain lack of emotional and moral nuance, Fallout delivers where necessary in the action stakes, firing on all cylinders; after all, we are here to see shit being blown up, people getting mown down by reams of bullets, bruising fight sequences, monumental vistas, edge-of-your seat thrills, vertiginous camera angles, and actors (especially the up-and-at-’em, no-holds-barred Cruise) accomplishing astonishing stunts – a lot of which seem incredibly ‘real’, seemingly without much CGI trickery. This isn’t meant to be an existential arthouse chamber piece, and you gets what you paid for, which I’m pretty much happy with, in this particular instance.

There are a number of stand-out, action set pieces, the most exciting of which are a (quite literally) breathtaking skydive from a plane, then moments later, a riveting, brutal fight scene between Cruise, Cavill and a Japanese martial arts conversant baddy, in claustrophobic toilet cubicles. Taking his cue from the rebooted Craig-Bond films (which themselves were inspired by the more realistically inclined Jason Bourne series), the director Christopher McQuarrie keeps the editing and spacial dimensions of the action to a systematically comprehensible flow, i.e. it’s not ‘all over the place’, messy, with blink-and-you will miss-it cutting and camera angles zipping to-and-fro. In general, he keeps to this methodology; he is in the mould of an old school director, and all the better for it. Another great fight sequence occurs when Hunt meets the alluring White Widow for the first time in a crowded nightclub and various assassins close in for the kill; she whips out a huge dagger and dispenses two of them in an instant, convincingly essaying a deadly femme fatale. Then there are plenty of impressive bike, car and rooftop chases. By now you should know what to expect with this franchise, and it does what it says on the tin, to the letter.

However, there is a slight downside to all this jaw-dropping mayhem, as it accumulates, in that each extraordinary set piece seems to have to outdo the last, and this can get a bit laborious sometimes, in the sense of diminishing returns; for example, in the helicopter chase sequence near the climax, when Cruise is hunting down Cavill, in his own helicopter, narrowly swerving between mountain tops and valleys at ultra-high velocity, they end up getting into one of those annoyingly cliche clifftop-hanging scenes, where everyone is ludicrously hanging by a thin rope. Sure, along with my own contention earlier that you aren’t meant to take these films too seriously, you can purport that it’s all just a ‘fantasy’ and normal physics isn’t meant to apply in such over the top circumstances. But, when the action just keeps on pushing the Internal Logic further and ever further, it eventually becomes rather self-defeating and repetitive.

But this is a small caveat: all in all, if not quite as cohesive, tightly controlled and (relatively) believable as Rogue Nation, this latest addition to the Mission Impossible mythology is a sure-fire crowd pleaser, especially if you are an aficionado of Bond-type rollercoasters and state of the art, cinematic whiz-bang.

Mission impossible Fallout review www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk