Mission: Impossible - Fallout continues to set a high bar for action movies

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.

The Rock is in a hard place...and the audience will love it

One of my favourite genre movies is Tremors (1990) in which a small Texas town finds itself under threat from a swarm of giant sandworms. It’s a creature feature but what makes it so good is that director Ron Underwood knows it’s a creature feature and knows what the audience expects. So he uses all the genre clichés – or tropes if you’re getting fancy about it – but does so in such a way that they inform the story rather than inhibit it. The makers of the early Final Destination films did exactly the same thing.

Which brings us to Skyscraper, the second movie of the summer to star The Rock. Two Dwayne Johnson movies in one summer – what a time to be alive. Like Tremors, Skyscraper knows its foundation myths and while this is film fairly and squarely aimed at modern audiences, it has its roots in the past. There are traces of Seventies disaster movies, there is an obvious nod to Die Hard (1988) and there is even a passing glance in the direction of Orson Welles epic finale to The Lady from Shanghai (1947). But all of these improve rather than restrict the storytelling.

Johnson is Will Sawyer a former hostage negotiator turned security consultant who gets the chance to bid for the job of his life, the contract for The Pearl. This is the world’s largest building and is as hi-tech as all get out. Sawyer and his wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) are having the time of their lives in Hong Kong but, as you would expect, there is a catch.

His erstwhile boss has something that the bad guys need. It’s a computer drive but, if I’m honest, I’m not sure what it does or why they need it. Anyway this is our McGuffin and everyone wants to get it. The bad guys decide the best way to do this is to set fire to the building.

The problem is that his wife and kids are in The Pearl and while everyone thinks it’s empty Johnson has to get inside the burning building, ideally around the 100^th floor, above the fire line, and save the day.

That’s it in plot terms. David Mamet says drama hinges on two things; what does a character want and why does it have to be now? In screenwriting terms these are known as ‘stakes’ and Johnson’s stakes are impeccably established. He wants to save his family and he needs to do it now before they are burned alive.

Skyscraper pretty much hits the ground running. Johnson’s character is established in a pre-credit scene in which a situation goes a bit pear-shaped and he ends up losing a leg. The consequent prosthetic plays a huge part in the rest of the story – Sawyer’s artificial limb is like Thor’s hammer, Captain America’s shield, and Indiana Jones’s whip rolled into one.

It’s this level of invention that makes Skyscraper such fun. The plot runs on train tracks, calamity after calamity is heaped upon our hero and armed only with his wits, enormous quantities of duct tape, and his trusty prosthetic, Sawyer has to save the day.

One of the joys of the film is, in these days of over-reliance on CGI and animation, it relies almost entirely on physical effects. Those are real stunts with real stunt people and while there is a lot of green screen for background, there is real physical effort going into this. In addition, the cinematography by Robert Elswit is superb. Elswit is well known in indie circles for his work with Paul Thomas Anderson but, as his work on the Mission: Impossible franchise shows he is something of an action specialist. You can almost feel the heat and smell the smoke here.

Johnson does what Johnson does, and he does it very well; he is the right man in the wrong place at the right time. His physicality is incorporated into the characterisation but even so, the requirements of the role push him to the limit. And, in keeping with most of his movies, he does not hog the action. The female characters in his films tend to have a good deal of agency in the outcome of the story and Neve Campbell is no exception here.

Skyscraper isn’t perfect, the breadcrumbs in the script are a bit obvious, but it is tremendous fun and harks back to a simpler cinematic time while at the same time making the audience gasp with novelty and excitement.