Mission: Impossible – Fallout
*ing: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Michelle Monaghan, Angela Bassett, Alec Baldwin
Rated: 8/10
If it’s Tom Cruise, it has to be Mission Impossible. If it is MI, it has to have action — thrilling, edgy, racy and tense. The fallout of this elongated episode in a long running series is that it starts on the chills and thrills (yes they are daunting) a wee bit late into the film with jargon dominating and dulling proceedings as an unintended introductory insult.
But once Fallout takes off, it is fantastic, compelling and peps up hopes of another one being still viable. Tom Cruise has not looked so young and happening in a long time so that one is a plus-plus. Every MI has one set piece action sequence that is much bigger than the last one. This time it is a virtual cliff-hanger in a virgin Hollywood locale. last time Ethan Hunt did a stunning skyscraper stunt hanging to dear life between slanting Shanghai buildings which took your breath away. Before that, he was he surprisingly survived a chopper-car tango and before that he raced dangerously raced through a tunnel dangling from a thin wire of hope that he may just might make it, that too only with celestial intervention.
Not that Cruise intentionally cheats us of the action here. He is under oath not to as Hunt, and he doesn’t break that mould in Fallout too, despite the late start. He is in the car, he is on the bike, he is on his racing legs and he is the man who pilots an ill-fated helicopter through the frozen and naked peaks of an Icelandic terrain. The ride, the crash and then the ultimate cliff-hanger is a never before insurance liability testing, death-defying and insanely thrilling sequence of events.
You go into the film asking how is Tom Cruise going to kill himself this time and come out wondering how the hell did he survive that one! That’s what makes Mission Impossible movies to be with, films to savour despite the familiar title and the lead and often even the plot put through slightly different moulds every time.
On the side, to juggle your emotions around Cruise’s personal wife, there is a wife lurking in the ice somewhere, the couple trying to stay away from each other so that Hunt is able to save the world and yet the two are baited in the mission. Alec Baldwin is cool as Mr Secretary but in MI it is — and should be — only about Hunt and his unusual hunts, and this one is no different.
Fallout and Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation director Christopher McQuarrie and his stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood do a pretty cool job by putting Cruise in the hot seat in all the chases, something that the actor too is known to insist on. The director promises you that “Tom is taking you places you would never or could never go. He’s allowing us to film things in a way they’ve never been done before. In some cases they’ll never be done again.”
Ethan Hunt fulfils this tall promise in style.