Mission: Impossible—Fallout

The Perpetual "Mission" Machine
or
"We'll Burn That Bridge When We Come To It"

The sixth of the Tom Cruise "Mission: Impossible" films has slammed into theaters going 90, and it's getting rapturous reviews. Yeah, it's okay, but it's not the best of the series; the original and Ghost Protocol are the best, and the last one (which was also written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie)—of which this is a direct sequel—was quite good, too. McQuarrie must be scratching his head: "you mean I can have the barest bones of plot, but just make it wall-to-wall stunts, and people will love it more than if I make something really intricate? Who knew?"

Who, indeed? This one subtitled Fallout is cobbled together from elements of the other "Mission: Impossible" movies* as well as recent entries in the James Bond franchise (the first time in a long time that other movies are borrowing from them instead of the other way around), but the main thing it's borrowed from that series is a short-hand story-telling in service as lattice-work connecting the stunt sequences.

It's pretty basic stuff. 

Ethan Hunt is having those horrible foreshadowing nightmares you only get in the movies. They usually involve a Mission gone wrong, killing himself and those he loves in the process. Something goes BOOM! in the distance and they go boom in the shock-wave. Wake up! Time for a special delivery (special because it requires code-phrases). It's a Mission: the capture of Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)—from Rogue Nation—has not ended his menace. He has inspired a cult of terrorists called "The Apostles" who conduct attacks around the world. Led by a mysterious figure named "John Lark," they are attempting to acquire three stolen plutonium cores to be used to build nuclear bombs, designed by an extremist nuclear scientist Nil Debruuk (Kristoffer Joner). Hunt's mission—should he decide to accept it—is to intercept the sale and out-bid for it. As Lane says at one point: "I wonder, did you ever choose not to?"

Now might've been the right time; at the hand-off in Berlin, things don't go as carefully planned—Hunt and fellow IMF-er Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) meet up with the sellers while Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) does reconnaissance in a van some distance away. They're compromised and Hunt chooses to save his team-mates, and in the ensuing firefight, they lose the plutonium. Who has it? 

Turns out it's not The Apostles but some other bad people, led by a "broker" named "The White Widow" (Vanessa Kirby), who is to have a meeting with that "John Lark" in Paris in that most secure of locations, a disco. Given how well he did in the first-go 'round, IMF division head Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) assigns Hunt to track Lark and intercept the meeting, but Hunley is overruled by his boss at the CIA, Erica Sloan (Angela Bassett), who distrusts Hunt to get the job done and assigns him their best "minder," Agent August Walker (Henry Cavill) to keep him in his sights and in line.

Paris being a tough town to get into these days, Walker and Hunt stage a HALO jump (High Altitude-Low Opening) to land on the roof of the disco and infiltrate searching the crowd for Lark. The idea is to find Lark, incapacitate him, make a 3-D mask of his face and let Hunt impersonate him for the meeting with The Widow, but the guy they've tracked as Lark is a little tougher for them to take on—both Walker and Hunt are used as mops in a bathroom brawl, where the three pummel pusses and porcelain, and it is only the intervention of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, also from Rogue Nation) that keeps him from killing one or both of them. Unfortunately, though, amid her fortunate entrance into a men's room, she's killed the guy. "Could we still make the mask?" she asks. "You need a FACE to make a mask!" Hunt replies. 

So, they do what the IMF always does, they spit-ball—or, in the phrase Hunt uses throughout this one, "I'm working on it"—since no one knows what Lark looks like, Hunt elects to pose as him for the meeting with The White Widow—unfortunately, there are all sorts of assassins looking to take Lark out on sight and since his appearance with The Widow is a dead give-away, he and Walker and The Widow only make it out of the rendezvous by killing a few assailants among the bystanders. Some secret mission.

At the meeting, The Widow gives Hunt and Walker one of the cores and presents the price they must pay for the other two: spring Solomon Lane from captivity, which she has already carefully arranged for them, by creating a viable distraction, while Lane is being transported in Paris. As her thugs are a bunch of murderous sociopaths, Hunt conspires to do them one better with the help of Benji and Luther. They manage to capture Lane with as little collateral damage as possible except for the brick-and-mortar kind. 

But, it makes Walker suspicious: he tells his boss that it is his contention that Hunt is actually Lark, and that it's not just a pose. He thinks he's gone rogue, really, this time: "How many times has Hunt's government betrayed him, disavowed him, cast him aside? How long before a man like that has had enough?" All true, of course. Cruise's Hunt is the most trusted and LEAST trusted spy in the movies. And, not that he didn't understand it before, Walker is told to keep watching him, and if he can prove his suspicions, take Hunt out.

Cue music (Lorne Balfe does a fine job adapting Lalo Schifrin's iconic music, by the way), wind Cruise up and let him go. The remainder of the movie is, basically, chases—motorcycle, cross-country (or city, in this instance, which is London), and culminating in a helicopter chase in the mountainous terrain of India, with the purpose of getting the key widget of a doohickey that will allow his IMF team to stop the two nuclear bombs that are deployed nearby in a remote section of the country—why set them off in India as opposed to more populous cities is anyone's guess.

Cruise doesn't do all of the stunts—some of the motorcycle work is not him—but so much of the dangerous stuff IS him that you can't fail to be impressed...and come to the conclusion that the man is, basically, nuts, and must have one hell of an insurance policy.

He's obviously been watching the Craig Bond's and the "Bourne" films and saying "I could do that"—after spidering around Dubai skyscrapers and clinging to the outside of planes, jungle-gymming under helicopters might have seemed like a bit of a rest—"AND I can keep my face in the camera the whole time." Cruise's self-promotion is legendary, although it didn't help him when he was pin-balling through The Mummy and American Made.

Okey-dokey. Not sure that doing that actually improves the movie, or gets him in good with any stunt-person's union, but sure, big hand for Tom. Way to go, kid. You manage to keep the focus on yourself and make sure the audience is watching you no matter what is going on around you.

They needed to do something because the central mystery of the film—"who is John Lark?"—is easily suspected somewhat early on and confirmed half-way through the film. Not that it matters: as Bassett's Sloan says at one point, "The IMF is Hallowe'en"—it's part of the fabric of the Mission: Impossible series that no one is who they seem to be, by nature or latex disguise, and the gambit has been exhausted in the M:I series. One is hardly surprised by the reveal, because at that point, the film is on auto-pilot.

At this point in the film and the series, Mission: Impossible—Fallout has given up on interesting set-pieces—like the opera sequence in Rogue Nation or the Dubai hotel team-gambit in Ghost Protocol—and deception as its inspiration and just goes for the jugular with the hyper-activity of what has been termed "chaos cinema," that breed of action film begat by The Dark Knight, where you didn't need logic in your story-telling so much as momentum and spectacle. You could also go so far as ignore internal logic in a shot if it produced the desired "buzz" in the audience. Momentum keeps audiences from asking too many questions because the next shock dispels the memory of that question—it's quite effective in presidential politics, too! So, to borrow a phrase from the film, if the other films were scalpels, then this one is a hammer. A blunt instrument to beat out objections. Not too far afield from John Woo's strategy in Mission: Impossible II (and, as I remember, that one stunk).

Look, kids, despite everything that we've been shown the last few years in theaters, "kinetic" does not equal "great." It's one thing to move the camera, it's another thing to move the heart and the mind. And unfortunately, that's one mission that government-run spy agencies always seem to get wrong.

This is from the trailer but does not appear in the film....

* Well, Vanessa Kirby plays a character called "The White Widow" who is actually the daughter of "Max," Vanessa Redgrave's character from the first film, Ethan Hunt has to match wits with another agent as in M-I II, Michelle Monaghan is back as Hunt's...wife... from 3, who was supposedly killed between 3 and 4, but that was just a deception (aw, fergettit) and Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa is back from 5, and Alec Baldwin's back again from 5...and on and on.