The new Mission: Impossible—Fallout is the sixth entry in the Tom Cruise franchise in 22 years—a franchise in which the first was fine, the second lousy, the third a silly effort to inject some personal drama into the life of Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, the fourth (directed by the animation master Brad Bird) pretty entertaining, and the fifth kind of meh. So imagine my surprise when Fallout proved to be not only the best in the series by a country mile, but one of the most astounding action-adventure pictures ever. This is the best James Bond movie never made. It’s what most ticking-time-bomb international spy pictures have wished to be. You want gripping? This thing is as gripping as a giant squid.
Forget the plot, which I didn’t understand even while I was watching it—something about a network of fanatics with no defined ideology wanting to blow up the world for no clear reason I could make out. People double-cross each other, intelligence agencies fight with each other, and Tom Cruise has a rival in Henry Cavill, who’s 14 feet taller. You can also forget the movie’s two love stories, with Cruise feeling guilt about saving the world rather than being with his wife and also having to deal with the reappearance of his girlfriend from the fifth movie, who seems hostile even as she keeps saving his bacon. The banter between Cruise and his Impossible Missions Force sidekicks, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, is good, but it’s not what makes the movie special.
Fallout is an instant classic of the action-adventure genre because it’s likely that Cruise (who also produced) and his longtime collaborator Christopher McQuarrie (the writer-director best known for the Oscar-winning screenplay of The Usual Suspects) sat down and made a deliberate and ambitious decision to take various types of action-movie sequences and try to make the definitive versions of them. And they come close to succeeding in every case.
A chase through the streets of Paris with Cruise on a motorcycle is an old chestnut given thrilling new life. Later, Cruise pursues Cavill through London on foot by running through buildings, smashing windows, landing on roofs, and crossing the Thames atop a rail bridge—and I don’t care if he’s 56 and was running in slow motion that got sped up to make him look like he was Steve Prefontaine, the scene is dazzling. A fight in a glistening white bathroom at the Musée d’Orsay that leads to its destruction is just about the best fight in a bathroom ever.
Good as all of that stuff is, it pales before the movie’s two head-spinning set pieces. The first is a skydive from 35,000 feet that goes wrong, during which you hold your breath and shake your head at the wonder of it all, even though you know Cruise’s character isn’t going to get hurt because there’s still 90 minutes to go in the movie. The second, the movie’s edge-of-the-seat climax, features Cruise in hot pursuit of a villain at the helm of a helicopter through the cavernous mountains of Kashmir—a series of action stunts and tricks that builds and builds and builds over about 15 minutes until you could almost pass out from excitement.
And to give McQuarrie credit for one nifty bit of writing, there’s a series of interlocking plot twists in the middle of the film (in which a terrific Alec Baldwin plays a pivotal role) that manage to startle and surprise in a way no previous Mission Impossible ever has. Even the patented ridiculous MI specialty—“I will now rip off my face and show I was wearing a mask all along”—is approached in a fresh fashion not once, but twice.
There’s nothing serious to be said about Mission Impossible: Fallout. It doesn’t have politics. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a surpassingly competent piece of moviemaking, sure-handed and determined the way Cruise is determined—to make you enjoy yourself, come out of the theater, and tell other people they should drop everything and buy a ticket. It’s the most entertaining picture of the year so far.
