Review of Mission Impossible: Fallout

**** 1/2 out of five stars

Currently in wide release

by Walter G. Tarrow

Tight, taut and twisty thriller right up there with the best of the summer blockbusters.  A heart stopping exercise in action perfection.

Mission Impossible: Fallout is the sixth outing with Tom Cruise in the lead again as Ethan Hunt, head of the IMF ( Impossible Mission Force). Make no mistake about it, this is Ethan’s, er, Tom’s show.

Cruise is on camera, is at the center, IS the center of the action effectively for the entire movie. 

He carries, as does his character, the battle throughout. HE races the motorcycle and speeds the car through the streets of Paris. HE runs across the roofs of London in pursuit of the bad guy. HE flies the helicopter in one of the most thrilling aerial acrobatic set pieces ever (this sequence reminded me of the Roy Scheider action classic Blue Thunder).  He is never the passenger. He is always the one where the buck stops.

And therein lies the quandary. The philosophical point of all these thrilling scenes, the unrelenting action, is that we wouldn’t be in these globally catastrophic situations if only Ethan would have listened to, and followed, the advice of Spock in Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, 

Instead of acting in the best interests of the many, he repeatedly allows the needs of the few, those of his team, his IMF, to outweigh, and put at risk time and time again, the needs of the entire planet. If only he would stop saving the lives of the members of his crew, often in spite of their own insistence for him to allow them to make their own sacrifice, there would be none of these messes. This is the figurative “fallout” that comes from his insistence on shouldering all the burden, all the responsibilities.

Also others, it’s most notably the villains (although in this type of modern actioner, it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, and that’s certainly, enjoyably so, the case here) who remind him that he always has the option NOT to do the mission (“Your mission, should you decide to accept it…”), that he can always just walk away.

But those are the very messes, the missions that ARE impossible that we come to the theater to see, to sit on the edges of our seats, and marvel at the awesome sweep and swoop of the camera, and those amazing stunts, one after another.

MI: Fallout may be Cruise’s baby, but just as, without his IMF buds Beni and Luther (Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames) and supporting players Hunley and Ilsa  (Alec Baldwin and Rebecca Ferguson), the mission would be impossible. Without a crackling script and direction from Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Jack Reacher). soaring cinematography and phenomenal editing, the movie would be, while maybe not impossible, very unlikely to succeed as well as it’s poised to do so. And it deserves to be recognized come awards season.

Sound and sound editing are remarkable with the clever choice to silence “street” noise and the din of weapons fire/explosions at several crucial moments drawing us even closer to the visual impact of the action. The effect is an auditory treat akin to the slowing down of physical action and stunts to allow for a savoring of the craziness of the moment.

All the stunts are amazingly physical and breathtakingly fresh. Stunts so cinematically astounding that we forgive the occasional logical flaw, the obvious twists, and the clichéd plot devices like the countdown clock that is somehow out of sync with the screen time (you know what I mean. The clock says thirty seconds, but the fight lasts at least several minutes…)

I have to take the party line and agree with the masses here, if you’re planning on seeing one thrill ride of a movie this summer, Mission Impossible: Fallout is your obvious choice.