Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a 148 minute mission to stop a plutonium nuclear bomb from detonating. The bomb’s attached to a countdown, of which must be stopped first before the wires can be cut to avoid a disaster killing over a billion people worldwide. I guess it isn’t a spoiler to say (this is a franchise, after all) the countdown is stopped. As this happens, the weapon of mass destruction disengages, pulls itself apart, and two plutonium balls drop out into the hands of nearby characters.
I describe this whole situation because by the end of this movie, it became clear to me those plutonium balls are something else: us, the audience. The tension, of which is miraculously sustained the entire film, is finally released, and into the palm of the hands of the movie itself. We can finally breathe, knowing Tom Cruise did not die a death faked by the studio. We know they’ll make enough money from this installment to send Cruise to space and/or pay for a team of researchers to figure out just what he could possibly do to top himself.
For the previous sequel, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Cruise trained to hold his breath for nearly 6 minutes underwater. The problem with this feat is that the necessity of how they filmed and edited the scene made it difficult to tell if it was for real or not. Some digital trickery had to be employed to ensure safety, which only dampened the illusion. Contrast this with the high-speed motorcycle chase around the winding roads of Morocco – which clearly had Cruise doing it for real – and you can see where writer/director Christopher McQuarrie’s own mission became clear: make an entertaining movie that makes it clear Tom is doing this batshit crazy stuff for real, creating high stakes for both the actor and the character alike.
As a result of all this, everything that Tom does in this film looks legimitately dangerous. A soon-to-be legendary bathroom fight – which has supplanted Eastern Promises’ bathhouse fight as cinema’s greatest fight amongst the toilets and sinks – looks beyond brutal and destructive. You might as well wrap the scene up in an office, give it a name, and consider it a new demolition business. A motorcycle chase through Paris has Tom doing his usual dangerous thing right up until he’s hit by a car and a slightly CGI Tom has to take his place to ensure he lives beyond the movie. And finally, the helicopter chase through the mountains of Kashmir: we will be talking about this one – what’s on the screen and what it took to accomplish it – for a long, long time.
Even more impressive to me is how McQuarrie and Co. managed to include its franchise star’s greatest collection of stunts in the same movie as his character’s most personal story yet. McQuarrie made it clear in interviews that Ethan Hunt had often functioned as a cipher in the Mission: Impossible movies, doing whatever the plot calls for but with no clear motivation of his own beyond the mission at hand. He’s been held at a distance while his team stands in awe of their greatest living weapon. A dream sequence that starts Fallout lets us know this is a new game: it’s going to be Hunt’s most personal yet and suggest costs he’s never had to reckon with.
McQuarrie challenged Cruise as an actor, Cruise challenged the crew as the wealthiest, most-famous stuntmen around, and absolutely everyone rose to the occasion. Special things happen with this kind of harmony. It’s enough synergy to disarm a nuclear weapon.
Not a fan of what Cruise espouses, but can often separate his product from the persona. Have heard awesome things about this one. May see it later when the hubbub dies down or wait for Redbox. We’ll see.
Very few actors work as hard as he does. I got a lot of respect for him in that regard. However you see it, definitely worth checking out and discussing later!