Mission: Impossible Fallout

With a franchise like Mission: Impossible you kind of know what to expect going into the film. World espionage, a potential catastrophic doomsday advice, villains with accents, Tom Cruise in full on sprint mode and a whole lot of action that most likely raises the stakes in some way to differentiate it from it’s predecessors.

Each installment tries to give the viewer the same but different kind of experience, each with varied results. Mission: Impossible Fallout surpasses those minimal expectations with a fine balance of misdirection, drama and action that puts this sixth installment of the franchise up there with the original as best Mission Impossible films of the franchise.

Fallout begins in the cheesiest of rain-soaked back alley intelligence meets as a shadowy figure finds Ethan Hunt (Cruise) holed up in a damp safe house and gives him a package, his next mission. A lot of exposition here in the first 10 minutes, which is grossly boring, however, it is a homage to the original television series which basically gives it a pass.

Hunt’s mission, which he always choses to accept, is to retrieve stolen uranium to insure the Rogue Syndicate doesn’t get their hands on it to make nuclear weapons, because with these guys, their motto is “No Peace without great suffering,” i.e. mass casualties.

And who are these guys by the way? This Rogue Syndicate? Any and everyone in the highest reaches of world intelligence. There’s so many leaks, double-crossing, back-handed maneuvers you’d think this was the Whitehouse. I want to say it’s a bit far-fetched but if it works in real life, why not here too?

Hunt fails in this retrieval. Why? Because this is the new Ethan Hunt. Every since MI III where he got married, he’s a more sensitive, caring man, deciding to save his IT specialist Luther over retrieving the Uranium. However, this leads to the bigger game of finding the Uranium and the head of Rogue Syndicate, an alias by the name of John Lark which in part takes the viewer on a series of actions sequence each better than the rest.

Actually let me clarify here.

By action sequences I mean chase sequences. We’ve seen them done time and time again but the craftsmanship shown by director Christopher McQuarrie was absolutely top-class. His mega-chase scene in Paris, the best I’ve seen since 2004 Bourne Supremacy and the helicopter climax at the end has you absolute gripped into the film, with a claustrophobic type of realism that puts the viewer inside the cockpit.

There’s much more to chew on that I’ll leave for the viewer to experience as they fall through the numerous traps laid by McQuarrie, who also wrote the film and it’s clever misdirection tactics that leave the viewer awed in some of the most entertaining of ways.

This is the lone Hollywood blockbuster of the summer that his lived up to the hype and gives us a sequel that was somehow the same but different.   A very nice surprise.