Review: Mission: Impossible: Fallout

It's safe to say that back around the turn of the century if you'd asked anyone what two franchises were going to dominate action movies in the 21st century they wouldn't have said Mission: Impossible and The Fast & The Furious. And not just because The Fast & the Furious didn't hit cinemas until 2001. It's not exactly a weird direction for action movies to take: building franchises around crazy stunts has never been a bad idea. But actors used to be important too; it's a sign of how diminished the idea of performance and charisma has become that the big selling point of Tom Cruise now is that hey, maybe he's going to die making this one.

Then again, for a movie touted as a non-stop action thrill ride, opening with a scene where Cruise watches a "previously on"-style informational movie for around two minutes is a brave choice – especially as pretty much everything he’s told we can safely and instantly forget. But that’s how these kind of movies have always worked, and with the learning out of the way Ethan Hunt (Cruise) can get back to the job of saving the world one crazy over-extended stunt sequence at a time. 

The story actually does hold together if you pay attention, but why would you? It’s just the usual “terrorists have the bomb, stop them before it goes off” deal with a few fun twists involving the Mission: Impossible Force’s fondness for masks and deception mixed in. And while those moments are fun, they've become the equivalent of the scenes in the Fast & Furious films where Toretto heads down to the local street racing convention to make everyone there feel bad; they're just a faint echo of what these franchises were going to be about before the stunts took over.

So what about those stunts, hey? The film takes a little while to get going - there's no opening where Cruise hangs off the side of a plane here - but eventually things reach the kind of exhausting crescendo that single-handedly justifies Hollywood’s existence for another fiscal year. It’s a smorgasbord where each item is only served up once – one fist fight, one car / bike chase, one rooftop running sequence (where everyone knows to watch for the stunt that busted Cruise’s ankle), one helicopter chase while dangling off the undercarriage.

Ironically, while Cruise's determination to do all his own stunts makes for great marketing - "maybe he's going to die making this one" is a sales point that's hard to beat at a time when actors in general are increasingly superfluous - it tends to cramp the actual film-making when it comes to the big sequences. Having Cruise do his own foot chase stuff is one thing; seeing him actually doing the running is both exciting and fun, especially as his running style is, uh, hard to duplicate.

But when it comes to the bigger sequences, having the actor involved actually limits the kind of footage available. Having Cruise really skydive out of a plane is kind of pointless when it comes to creating a thrilling sequence; it'd actually look more exciting if it was done with computers and green screen. What's being celebrated here is a kind of film-making that's rapidly becoming obsolete: when both actors and stunts have been replaced by zeros and ones, this'll stand as a slightly unnerving monument to a time when western civilisation spent a fortune so a tiny man could have a fist fight on a cliff top.

- Anthony Morris