How good can a summer tentpole, the sixth film in a long running series be? Especially when the star is getting a bit long in the tooth and has, shall we say, “personal issues.” The least of which might be the fact that his box office grosses have reached a point of diminishing returns.
That’s the question Mission Impossible: Fallout aims to answer.
Tom Cruise has had a remarkable run at the box office for thirty-plus years. He has positioned himself as the last action hero. Or at least the oldest (all apologies to Liam Neeson who’s in in the fade now). Outside of the Mission films, the Cruiser’s efforts to set up another franchise have fallen woefully short. Jack Reacher got a sequel no one was asking for and The Mummy, er, died in its tomb. Taking down an entire cinematic universe with its demise.
Which is why the MI series is so important to Cruise. As far as hits go, it’s the only thing he can count on. That’s not to say he hasn’t snuck in some films of quality in this latter portion of his career. The two movies he made with Doug Liman are both pretty damn good. Last year’s American Made was a good reminder of his undiminished charm. He plays a fine rascal with that megawatt smile of his. Even better was the poorly titled Edge of Tomorrow (seriously, who doesn’t prefer Live. Die. Repeat.?). A smashing mix of the Terminator and Groundhog Day.
Neither lit the fuse with audiences though. And Cruise – who seems to have largely left behind the left turns in his career (Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, Born on the 4th of July, etc.) – is back in the ring to take another swing as Ethan Hunt.
It’s a little sad, really. The idea that Cruise spends all this time chasing hits. But here we are.
I’ve always been a bit mixed on the MI Series. The first one I found a bit workmanlike outside of the suspended in air download heist sequence. John Woo’s follow up was completely batshit. I’m not sure if it’s a wonderfully terrible movie or just a terrible terrible movie. I did begin to warm to the series with the third film, which paradoxically is the least successful of the six.
JJ Abrams brought genuine emotion to MI3. The inclusion of Michele Monaghan as Ethan’s wife humanized the proceedings. Philip Seymour-Hoffman is still the best villain of all the films. The late great brought a strange sort of soulless detachment that made him terrifying in a very real way. There was no mustache twirling or scenery chewing. Hoffman was all the more frightening because he seemed like he might actually exist in the world.
Films 4 and 5 had a similar vibe. High on thrilling stunt work and action set ups. They were both brilliant machines. But they were machines.
Which is what makes this sixth installment so enjoyable. It’s a near perfect blend of the heart exhibited in 3 and the eye-popping action of numbers 4 and 5.
By now, we feel we have a good sense of Ethan Hunt. Let’s face it, he’s basically a Tom Cruise avatar. Driven. Relentless. All teeth. 6 does an improved job of showcasing his connection with Simon Pegg’s Benji and Ving Rhames’ Luther. There is an easygoing comraderie between the three. While the film version of Mission Impossible is miles upon miles from the team-oriented concept of the television show it was birthed from, Benji and Luther are given more to do here than usual. It’s a slight but welcome shift.
Better still is Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa. Cruise can have a tendency to overpower his female counterparts on film. Especially if they are not fully written. That doesn’t happen with Ferguson. Who is entirely believable as a secret agent and has a strength of presence that is conveyed even without dialogue. She also shares solid chemistry with Cruise as well. This may be a Tom Cruise movie, but she does not take second place when onscreen.
The return of Monaghan is essential too. Late in the film there is a genuinely affecting sequence between her and Cruise. The type of scene that would hold up just fine in a straight drama that has nothing to do with attempting to stop a group known as The Apostles, who are looking to set off three nuclear bombs to cause chaos, anarchy, and a new world order.
Which of course, sounds a bit like almost any plot of an action movie like this. Let’s face it, if you spend too much time thinking about it, well, it would seem ridiculous. Because, you know, it kinda is.
The smart thing director Christopher McQuarrie (back again after 5) does here is he never gives you much time to wrap your mind around plot. Because this thing moves. For the first time in a career spanning nearly 40 years, Tom Cruise is in a film that may be more relentless than he is. The film barely allows a breath before moving on to the next fraught sequence.
While some of these set pieces are particularly spectacular (the skydiving and helicopter scenes come to mind), others are quite rugged. Cruise and fellow agent Henry Cavill slugging it out with a mark who is in no way easy in a public loo is brutal. Rebecca Ferguson’s tête-à-tête with villain Sean Harris in the latter portion of the film is almost on the same level. You also get a lot of Cruise running. And let’s face it, no actor has ever performed that action onscreen with more alacrity than our Tommy.
Cruise does seem more physically vulnerable here. It’s not only that he finally seems a little older (he’s 5 years older than Wilford Brimley was in Cocoon – wrap your mind around that), but all the running, and jumping, and punching, and derring do comes with some consequence. There’s a sequence where Cruise is jumping from rooftop to rooftop, misses his leap, crashes into the side of the building, and limps away. Maybe it helped that I knew Cruise actually broke his leg in that scene and that drag in his right limb was real. Whatever the case, for the first time ever, Tom Cruise is having trouble keeping up with his own movie.
Cruise and crew my be trying to save the world, but they are having a hard time saving themselves. Even though you know better, MI6 makes you feel like something is at stake. Which is a fairly remarkable accomplishment.
There’s a certain snobbery that exists in some quarters of criticism about action films in general. A dismissiveness that many of us who write about movies have been guilty of.
There are times though. Times when the big machine with all the corporate tie-ins, the outlandish plotting, the ridiculous stunts, all that which make critics and awards shows turn up their noses, so successfully elevates its genre as to almost be separate from it.
I’m thinking of the second and third Bourne films. Daniel Craig’s first Bond picture. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight.
On occasions such as this, a certain deference must be paid. The rules of criticism set aside because they are rendered superfluous by the sheer experience of being put into a cinematic blender and poured into your ride home after catching your breath and releasing the arms of your seat.
Films like this don’t often win awards. Hell, films like this rarely even get nominated for awards.
We all know why that is. I’m not sure that’s right though. At the beginning of this review I asked a question. How good can a film like this be? As it turns out, very. And not simply by its own standards, although certainly that.
No.
Mission Impossible: Fallout isn’t just the best of the series, it’s one of the best films of the year.
1>2>Rogue Nation>Ghost Protocol=3>Fallout
Didn’t care much for the latest one. The other five are lovable (1 the only one really worthy of praise and timeless affection), but Fallout felt irrelevant to me.
I’m finding it very annoying that seemingly whenever I write a longer comment here these days (for example I wrote 700 words about this franchise to this thread yesterday), it gets automatically considred by Disqus as spam. I don’t care about the posts that have aready been deleted but does Ryan or someone else know how I could make sure that in the future my rambling posts aren’t deleted?
Ferdinand, I wasn’t aware of the problem until now.
I’ll try to find out what causes it.
In the meantime, if something goes missing, just ask me via email or here in the comments and I’ll rescue it for you.
I’ll email you so you have my address, k?
Sorry about the annoyance.
Your comments are always among the best assets on the site!
Thank you so much, Ryan. The care you and the other writers here give to helping the readers with problems like this is always so great and along with about 10000 other things makes this site such a joy to read
That’s cool. Can we get a review reactions anything on blackkklansman. comes out this week. Very impressive to see it at 97% rt. This might be spikes comeback?
Some thoughts I had about the film and the franchise in general:
I’ve always thought that the Mission Impossible series is one of the better franchises out there. That is because to me it has always been taking a filmmaker with a very particular style and letting them go wild with whatever they wanted to do with Tom Cruise and absurd stunts and thus find their own brand of bold and interesting action filmmaking. Every film reinvents the style and narrative of these films and that is great. As studios try to search for “cinematic universes” and other ideas where a bunch of filmmakers and films are jammed into one mold so that they all feel like episodes in a TV series, every single one these films feels like it’s got its own niche, a little something that’s weird and that the filmmakers clearly care about getting right. As a result the style and narrative are messy and inconsistent but it leads to better films as nothing is done because it “has to be done” but because the filmmakers want to do it.
Mission: Impossible honestly feels like a Brian de Palma film through and through and as a result achieves levels of cinematic style that is rarely seen in films of this style and level. Mission: Impossible II is a horrible mess but it’s clearly trying to do something very particular even if it fails miserably. Mission: Impossible III feels like the only time J.J. Abrams is actually trying a style as a director that is his instead of just making something incredibly bland (his Star Trek movies) or copying Spielberg or Lucas (Super 8 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, respectively). Ghotocol goes for scale and entertainment value and Rogue Nation is trying to figure out how to find a synthesis between extremely precise and symphonic set-pieces and character-driven narrative beats.
And Fallout to me is no different from these, even though it doesn’t have a new director. That is because it feels completely different from Rogue Nation both from a techncal point of view (I love Robert Elswit so much but it was time that someone else took over these films because his work links Ghotocol and Rogue Nation in ways that they really shouldn’t be) and from a point of view of narrative and thematic goals. But this time the change is different as Fallout is in so many ways a synthesis of all the previous films, a way of pulling all of these odd ideas of what these films should be from the previous works together and binding them to build its own themes, emotions and ferocious visual style. The bombasticness of DePalma’s film, certain visual choices from Woo’s work (at least the wall fight scene feels like an homage to the wall climbing scene in the second film), the backstory from Abrams’ film, the way the set-pieces were built in Bird’s film and the narrative of McQuarrie’s previous film feel mixed in so that the film can tell a story of consuquences. In the narrative Ethan has to finally face the consuquences of every single one of his choices and every single one of his decisions to not choose. I feel that McQuarrie is at the same time forcing the franchise to do the same as he takes things that have already been “solved” and handled by the franchise and opens them up to redefine them.
What this causes is that the film feels like the definitive (though not the best) and perhaps also the last Mission: Impossible film. McQuarrie uses and redefines every single element that he can from the previous films and while doing that also detroys any possibility of any further use for the narratives of those films. This feels like the story that the previous films were all leading to, even if they didn’t know that back then and it works brilliantly as that kind of an endpoint. And how can you even continue from this? A completely random narrative would feel odd and would in so many ways destroy what is so fascinating about this film and something that would try to continue from this might feel derivative so easily.
Fallout is a brilliant film and the defining moment for these films as this franchise that was built on re-invention finally has stopped and looked back at itself, realizing that it can’t keep on changing forever.
I too thought Edge of Tomorrow was a pretty darn good movie.
It’s excellent. That damn generic ass title though.
Found on the internet – interview with Kathleen Turner on Vulture. Especially this part of the interview:
“But are mainstream Hollywood films less sophisticated than when you were starring in them?
Gosh, the last film I went to, every trailer was a Marvel comic movie or a
shoot-’em-up.
It was all guns and superheroes. I just thought, Why isn’t someone
doing something different? I would think that whoever could offer an
alternative would make a killing. I imagine that’s what television does
so well now.”
Before MI came on – I sat through 20 minutes of comic-type movie trailers and I was bored to death.
I mean, its adapted from a manga called all you need is kill and has a tagline live, die, repeat. Both of those would have been infinitely more interesting names for it than edge of tomorrow (and even they aren’t great). Still, I agree its a great movie