Short review for everyone complaining that my reviews are too long: This movie is good.
Now, for everyone else: Mission: Impossible is one of those series that’s perfectly fine, but I can never remember a damn thing about them. I know that Part 2 is my least favorite and has that godawful Metallica song, but I can’t really distinguish them beyond that. It doesn’t help that Tom Cruise has seemingly been 40 years old for the past 20 years, so I can’t even tell them apart by his age. They aren’t great, they aren’t bad, they are just a fairly entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. And there is nothing wrong with that. Fallout, the sixth film in the series, is probably the best one so far. I’m not sure if I will remember much of it in six months, but it is a solid action movie that’s a step above the rest of the series. I think.
As a quick aside, this movie should have been a crossover with the James Bond series. Get it? Mission: Impossible 6? MI6? Whatever. It’s not about that. It’s also thankfully not about the government turning on Tom Cruise for the sixth fucking time. The plot revolves largely around the theft of three plutonium cores that the bad guys want to exchange for the release of Solomon Lane, the bad guy from the last movie (which was Rogue Nation, for anyone else that hates it when they stop numbering sequels). Lane wants to use the plutonium to nuke the water supply for China, India and Pakistan, thus killing about half of the world’s population. He wants to do that for what I presume are reasons. Then people turn on other people and people are double agents and whatnot. There is at least one character that I’m still not sure if they are a good guy or not.
It’s pretty convoluted (something of a throwback to the first movie), but the story is honestly not the point of this series. The point is the action sequences and this movie delivers in that regard. Highlights include a motorcycle chase through Paris that reminded me of playing Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast with its complete disregard for both physics and public safety. My favorite, though, is an impressive helicopter chase, complete with machine guns and stunts that would make the Looney Tunes ask for extra insurance. Tom Cruise may be a crazy bastard, but I have to give the man a lot of credit for his dedication to pulling off these stunts in (mostly) practical ways without using a stunt double. I respect the hell out of this series for being something of a throwback to real stuntwork without an overreliance on computers and green screens. Yes, there are a few shots when you can tell that there is a green screen being used. But there are far more shots when you can tell there isn’t a green screen and are left wondering how all of these actors aren’t dead.
The characters and performances are also fine, though (much like the plot) they aren’t exactly the strength of this series. Cruise returns (of course) and is, well, fine. The Ethan Hunt character lacks the charisma of James Bond, but he’s an entertaining and endearing enough character to keep things going. Henry Cavill joins the series as a stoic badass, which isn’t exactly a departure for him. He’s also perfectly okay, though it’s a bit distracting that he could clearly snap Cruise like a twig if he ever decided to do so. Fun fact: By the time that Warner Bros. decided to refilm most of Justice League, Cavill had already grown a mustache for this movie and couldn’t shave it because of his contractual obligation to Paramount. Consequently, Warners had to digitally remove the mustache and that’s why Superman’s face looks like a photo-shopped nightmare during much of that film. Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg return as the comic relief characters and do their normal shtick. Since Paramount makes both this series and Star Trek, they might as well establish that Pegg is playing the ancestor of his Trek character because they are basically the same person. Hunt’s wife returns in this, which was odd because I forgot he had a wife (though they apparently got divorced at some point?). The problem is that there has been a female agent in the last couple of these that looks similar to the wife, so I think my brain combined them into one character at some point in the series. Following his absence in Avengers: Infinity War, Jeremy Renner is also missing from this film. Frankly, I’m becoming concerned about him. If he’s missing from the next Avengers, we all need to do something. #findjeremyrenner
This is a very good action movie. It isn’t great (and by “great,” I mean something like Die Hard or First Blood), but I really don’t have any specific complaints about it. If all the major action franchises were kids in school together, then James Bond would be the valedictorian, the Fast & Furious series would be the kid that’s still in pre-algebra and trying to get through The Giver in senior year, and Mission: Impossible is that kid that gets mostly Cs but swears he’s really smart but just doesn’t want to try. Well, I actually have to give that kid some credit here. I wouldn’t grade this as an A, but it’s a solid B+. As my father would say, that’s good enough for government work.
Image By: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/ff/MI_%E2%80%93_Fallout.jpg
