In this sixth instalment of the famous franchise, Ethan Hunt (rather, let’s face it, Tom Cruise) is as ready as ever to do the hard work himself, but tying up decades-old loose ends can be a messy business.
USA
3*
Director:
Christopher McQuarrie
Screenwriter:
Christopher McQuarrie
Director of Photography:
Rob Hardy
Running time: 145 minutes
Imagine, for a moment, you’ve reached the climax of a high-energy, globetrotting action film. For most of the past two-and-a-half hours, the characters have been relatively solid, and the story has unspooled at a pretty good clip. On top of the Eiffel Tower, the good guy and the bad guy have been at each other’s throats for what feels like ages. For the umpteenth time, we suspend our disbelief and tell ourselves that the 15-minute countdown to the end of the world is still in effect. Finally, as we catch our breath right after disaster has been averted in the nick of time, the camera zooms out to reveal the Bellagio fountains in the background, and we realise this “Eiffel Tower” is, in fact, the one in Las Vegas. And yet, the film continues to insist that this is Paris, not the Las Vegas our eyes so very plainly see.
That’s basically the stupid stunt Mission: Impossible – Fallout pulls right at the end, when we are told the action takes places in the Himalayas, but down below the fjords are pretty, the hillsides are green, and this rocky outcrop is very clearly not the Roof of the World but rather the world-famous Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock) on Norway’s west coast. Unless we’re to believe that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) somehow helicoptered his way through a wormhole linking Kashmir to Scandinavia, this makes very little sense, particularly because so little effort has gone into hiding the truth. After all, a crucial interaction early on involves a Norwegian nuclear weapons specialist.
In this instalment (the sixth in total), Ethan Hunt again teams up with his long-time computer hacking partner, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who’s been with him for the past two decades, and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg in a welcome low-key appearance), who’s done half the time. Given Hunt’s team’s track record, however, the new CIA director, played by Angela Bassett, insists that someone from the agency’s special division join the team. That individual is the seemingly by-the-book August Walker (Henry Cavill), who, attitude problem aside, appears to be professional enough.
Not unlike a James Bond plot, the film’s villain is bent on having a global reach and is ready to inflict significant pain to achieve his goals. Although his identity is a mystery at first (we can quickly figure it out for ourselves), his nom de guerre is John Lark. He heads up the terror network called The Apostles, whose goal is allegedly world peace, but the price to pay is immense suffering: Chillingly, three of the Abrahamic religions’ holy sites – the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca – are the initial targets of the nuclear devices.
In a film like this, however, our attention is not going to be on the generic details of the narrative but rather on how good or memorable the action scenes are. And while director Christopher McQuarrie’s plot is pretty standard for this kind of production, he does manage to stage one of the most exhilarating scenes of any of the (first) six films in the series: a chase scene on motorcycle through the streets of Paris that rivals anything that has come before and is the most high-octane piece of filmmaking in the City of Lights since Claude Lelouch’s C’était un rendez-vous.
The whole scene is sublime, from start to finish. Pursued by police, Ethan steers a truck into a narrow alleyway to force them to climb over the vehicle while he and August escape through the front window and speed off on waiting motorcycles. August speeds off, but for a tense few moments, Ethan can’t get his bike to start. When it does, damn the torpedoes, it’s full speed ahead. Not satisfied with merely weaving in and out of traffic, Ethan also heads straight up against the flow into one-way streets (and even clockwise around the Arc de Triomphe) and races through heavily congested crossroads, all shot with a camera that is as mobile as Ethan and follows him at full tilt as he swerves to evade the French police. In all of two minutes, McQuarrie reinvigorates the whole franchise.
And yet, the whole thing ends with a deus ex machina so preposterous the film takes on shades of that same impossibility-induced hilarity that the recent Fast & Furious films have mined for laughs. Whenever the screenplay writes itself into a corner, it simply paints an exit door through which to escape. Finding himself trapped, Ethan simply cuts some netting, falls through a grate and ends up inside an underwater canal where his buddies are calmly waiting to whisk him off in their speedboat. With these types of films, one will always suspend disbelief, but in light of the (albeit hyperreal) thrill ride of a chase scene, this kind of a twist is just a bridge too flimsy.
The film also relies too heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of, never mind emotional attachment to, characters from previous instalments: Ethan’s former wife, Julia, and former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust are two specific individuals whose presence here seems gratuitous. By contrast, a new character in the form of the mysterious White Widow (played by Vanessa Kirby with a mixture of sensuality and pure cheek) holds our attention in every one of her scenes. If she does make a comeback in the next episode, one hopes that hers would be a big role.
Clearly, this sixth instalment of the now more than 20-year-old big-screen Mission: Impossible franchise is not the best of the series. That distinction will (likely forever) belong to the very first one, directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Koepp and the legendary Robert Towne. That film’s set pieces, from the break-in at CIA Headquarters in Langley to the fast-paced climax on top of the Eurostar, might be small in scale compared with those of its successors, but – with the major exception of Fallout‘s chase scene in Paris – they still set our adrenaline pumping faster than anything else the series has offered us since.