Review: Mission: Impossible — Fallout, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie
I am a Tom Cruise fan. I think he should have an Oscar or two in the pool room, but I doubt it’ll come from this film.
It’s a little mind-boggling to think of it now, but Tom Cruise’s first film role was a small part in the 1981 teen romance Endless Love. The stars were model Brooke Shields, who still pops up in movies, and Martin Hewitt, who quit show business in the early 1990s and runs a home-inspection business in California.
Cruise had a bigger role later the same year in the trainee soldiers drama Taps. Then, two years on, he white-sock-danced to stardom in Paul Brickman’s romantic comedy Risky Business. He was 21 then. Today he is 56 and still saving the world in various guises, including as crypto-government special agent Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible — Fallout.
I am a Cruise fan. I think he should have an Oscar or two in the pool room. Yet I can’t complain about who received them instead.
He deserved one as best supporting actor in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), but so did the actor who got the nod, Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules. Ditto with his best-actor nominations for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (Daniel Day-Lewis won for My Left Foot) and Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (Geoffrey Rush won for Shine).
I think the best years in his career so far are from the late 90s to mid-2000s. I know I am in the minority here but I liked him a lot opposite Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999). He is superb as the hitman in Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004). A bit later, in 2008, his cameo as the profane Hollywood studio boss in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder is a comic masterpiece. His Oscar may yet come, though not for the sixth instalment in the MI franchise, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, following Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (2015).
McQuarrie is the only director to be entrusted with more than one MI movie. The fact his first one made $US650 million no doubt helps, but so does his longstanding relationship with Cruise. He wrote and directed the action thriller Jack Reacher (2013)and co-wrote the Hitler assassination drama Valkyrie (2008) and the remake of The Mummy (2017), all starring Cruise.
If Mission: Impossible — Fallout is on your maybe list, I have two suggestions. First, see it on an IMAX screen to maximise the thrilling and innovatively shot action scenes, such as the helicopter dogfight over the Himalayas and the motorbike and car chase through Paris.
Second, don’t pay too much attention to the script. Indeed, any time you see the actors standing still, take a bathroom break or go buy some more popcorn. You will miss nothing but an unnecessary overexplanation of what’s happening now and what happened in the past.
This flat script is disappointing from a filmmaker such as McQuarrie, who won a best original screenplay Oscar for Brian de Palma’s The Usual Suspects (1995). It’s as though he’s worried viewers will have forgotten what took place between the characters (most of the main roles are return gigs for the actors) in the previous movies. That’s not important in an MI movie. Indeed, it’s the not knowing that maintains our interest. The Impossible Missions Force is hardly a tell-all organisation, after all.
What McQuarrie and Cruise do well, with minimal dialogue needed, is make it clear that IMF agent Ethan Hunt has become more vulnerable. He’s older, for starters. He also has been through a lot, physically and emotionally.
There is a dream sequence, about his ex-wife, that takes us emotionally closer to him than we have been before. On the physical side, his vulnerability manifests in a stunning scene in which Hunt and CIA hitman August Walker (Henry Cavill) team up to fight a baddie (Liang Yang) in a bright white men’s room.
The location of the fight, amid the sparkling urinals and closed cubicles, is interesting. It’s possible to see a sexual element to it. Interesting, too, is its brutality. We see that Hunt can be hurt, even when backed up by a bloke 20 years his junior who usually plays Superman. Indeed Cavill's moustachioed, pugilistic presence adds a touch of humour that I think is intended. He’s the same age now as Cruise was when he made the first MI movie. There’s a crack about age. This scene, which is worth the price of a ticket, brought to mind Hugh Jackman’s weakened Wolverine in the outstanding Logan (2017).
The real Cruise, who does his own stunts, also can be hurt. He broke an ankle during shooting. The scene, of him jumping from roof to roof (pictured above), remains in place.
This may be a macho movie but the female characters have their say. Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson is excellent as the well-named former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust. She may or may not be on Hunt’s side. Equally mutable is Vanessa Kirby (Princess Margaret in The Crown) as an arms dealer with a knife in her garter belt.
Angela Bassett joins the franchise as head of the CIA. Alec Baldwin, Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames continue their roles as IMF boss and agents respectively. Sean Harris is back too as the now-imprisoned (but maybe not for long) anarchist leader Solomon Lane.
The plot? Well, that’s for viewers to discover. Hunt has a mission to recover three plutonium cores before Lane, or someone else, turns them into portable nuclear bombs and brings down civilisation. Hunt saved the world from nukes back in 2001 (Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol). Can he do it again? Or will he, as he approaches his 60s, be pensioned off, or worse?
Mission: Impossible — Fallout (M)
3.5 stars
National release