REVIEW: Mission: Impossible — Fallout is best pure action movie since Mad Max Fury Road

MISSION: Impossible — Fallout doesn’t just live up to the incredible advance hype. It blasts right past it, as the most ferociously realised action picture to storm the big screen since Mad Max: Fury Road.

YOUR cinematic mission, should you choose to accept it, should not be a matter of choice at all.

For Mission: Impossible — Fallout is not only the best film to carry the M:I badge in the 22-year-old history of the Tom Cruise-led franchise. It is also the most ferociously realised action picture to storm the big screen since Mad Max: Fury Road.

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If you have heard the early word on the clear and present greatness of Fallout, be assured this hyper-kinetic espionage adventure doesn’t just live up to the hype. It blasts right past it.

No one goes to a Mission Impossible film for the plot. Picture: Paramount Pictures

Every shred of that high praise has been earned the right way and the hard way: with big ideas, brashly executed, with little margin for error.

Breaking many a sweat (and in one already famous moment during shooting, an ankle) to ensure this perpetually twisting and tumbling affair continues to stick its dizzying array of difficult dismounts is 56-year-old Cruise.

His daredevil IMF agent Ethan Hunt remains a magnetic mascot for the M:I effect, flinging himself into the fray with impressive physical abandon (and importantly, often without any back-up from the special-effects team).

As usual, Hunt will be pole-vaulting all over the atlas, this time in a bid to stop some bad dudes from getting their grubby paws on some dirty nukes.

No-one ever really goes to a Mission: Impossible movie for the plot, and no-one in their right mind will be able to make too much sense of what Fallout is always up to on this front.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout is the best pure action flick in years. Picture: Paramount Pictures/AP

If you do need any vital story intel, pay close attention to the bits where Hunt and his super-spy sidekicks Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are banging on about some bloke called John Lark (an arms dealer no-one has ever seen) and some mob code-named The Apostles (a terrorist group everyone fears).

Otherwise, kick back and let a colourful cavalcade of support characters either provoke or prevent the next go-for-broke action sequence.

While there are too many worthwhile contributors in the lower casting tiers to list here, notable mention must be made of Henry ‘Superman’ Cavill as August Walker, the CIA assassin compelled by government decree to ghost Hunt’s every move.

Also making intriguing returns from the last M:I instalment Rogue Nation are Hunt’s good friend Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and mortal enemy Solomon Lane (Sean Harris).

The stunning design sensibility that has been poured into the set-piece action sequences of Fallout - and the thrilling stunt work powering them - are gifts that keep on giving throughout.

This is what you can only call carefully controlled chaos. So many action movies these days lose shape and coherency when they flick the switch to get to the jaw-dropping stuff.

However, not once does Fallout drop its guard on this front. Each precisely choreographed spectacle — whether it be at ground level on a busy Paris street, or on a jagged slab of rock high in the mountains of Kashmir — hustles the movie on in its chase for bigger, better and bolder things.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT (M)

Climbing to a new peak for the spectacular view

Rating: Four stars (4 out of 5)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher)

Starring: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris.

Originally published as REVIEW: Mission: Impossible — Fallout is best pure action movie since Mad Max Fury Road