It’s an indication of the maturity of this
franchise; six movies spanning more than twenty years that with this latest
episode Tom Cruise and his team allow themselves the luxury of a sequel.
There’s enough depth of storytelling, character and generic tropes in Mission: Impossible – Fallout to create a
spectacularly satisfying stand-alone film which also fits neatly into the existing
M: I canon.
In Fallout
we have the return of the villainous Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) from the fifth
film and his Syndicate goes even further back to the original TV show. The
enigmatic Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) features again from the fifth movie,
Mrs Hunt (Michelle Monaghan) is back from the third one and a cameo in the
fourth, and of course the ever reliable Luther (Ving Rhames) is on his sixth outing.
There’s new blood as well. Not least the shamefully underused Vanessa Kirby as
The White Witch, and Henry Cavill in perhaps his best role as the menacing
Walker.
At the heart of it all of course is Tom Cruise’s
Ethan Hunt, along with Rhames the series’ only ever-present. There’s a body of
material to be drawn on here especially in Hunt’s characterisation. The end of
the film, for example, relies on a skillset you may have forgotten from the
second movie. He’s been doing this for more than 20 years so what keeps him
going? The wording of the trademark mission message ‘should you choose to
accept it’, makes an interesting subtext. Why does he continue to make that
choice?
Although no less dynamic, Cruise manages to make
Hunt a little more thoughtful here. As a colleague pointed out Cruise, now 56,
approaches each of Hunt’s action stunts with a slight reluctance as if he knows
his knees and ankles are going to pay for it in the morning.
The one thing that remains impossible however is
the plot. Mission: Unfathomable might
be a better title. This time the IMF are looking for three missing plutonium
cores which can create three nuclear bombs capable of massive devastation. It
doesn’t really matter who has them at any given time or why anyone wants them;
the cores are a plot device and they do their job superbly. The quest for the
cores keeps the plot moving along at breakneck speed.
Everyone has a motive, sometimes more than one,
and everyone is out to double-cross everyone else or so it seems. Don’t worry,
every 20 minutes or so screenwriter Chris McQuarrie stop for quite an elegant
re-cap exercise. Although I completely understood why Henry Cavill asks at one
point ‘Why do you have to make this so bleeping complicated?’ Or words to that
effect.
In these days when big budget movies, no matter
how honourable their intentions at the start, all tend to end up as a soupy
morass of CGI, I’m thinking about Wonder
Woman for example, it is refreshing to see the Mission: Impossible franchise continue to rely on good
old-fashioned film making skills.
The cinematography (Rob Hardy) and editing (Eddie
Hamilton) are absolutely superb and the locations are expertly chosen. I’ve
said before in reference to this franchise that it relies on Ian Fleming’s
concept of ‘thrilling cities’; exotic background locales which make the
foreground action so much more interesting. Locations have seldom been so well
used as they are here. And all of it happens under the inestimable supervision
of Tommy Gormley, the first assistant director, who makes the cinematic train
run on time and here is also, deservedly, credited as co-producer.
The combination of all of this is a film which
feels real even though you know it can’t possibly be. The action sequences are
jaw-dropping; writer-director McQuarrie gets that car chases depend on what you
miss not what you hit for excitement, and the helicopter finale is simply the
best I’ve seen. Throughout all of this McQuarrie, for me a much underrated
talent, relentlessly maintains the film’s forward momentum.
At a whisker under two and a half hours we are
entitled to the occasional lull but it never feels slow. McQuarrie the
screenwriter has written a perfectly structured screenplay for McQuarrie the
director to take advantage of it.
At the core though is Cruise; the real stellar
force of this franchise. The vanity of the Impossible Missions Force is that
team members can be swapped out at will, as they were in the first two films.
But we all know there is no franchise without Cruise. After six movies he
brings gravitas to Hunt and provides a surprisingly emotional foundation for an
action movie.
Why does he choose these missions? I don’t know.
Will he choose another one? I’d bet on it.
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