"Mission: Impossible - Fallout" - Review

There is an enormous problem deep in the heart of the Mission: Impossible franchise. It’s not the convoluted plots, the double, triple, and sometimes quadruple crosses involving masks or the boring villains (Philip Seymour Hoffman being the exception). No, the problem I’m talking about is the fact that Tom Cruise’s super spy Ethan Hunt is an impossibly boring character with nothing to latch on to. He’s a cypher that functions like a video game character, and no amount of gorgeously directed and choreographed action can solve this problem.  
 
Picking up roughly two years after the previous entry — Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation — the world has fallen into chaos as the followers of Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) are doing terrorist things all over the place. Their latest dastardly plan is stealing three plutonium spheres that can be used to create nuclear bombs. But luckily the IMF (Impossible Mission Force), led by Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team of Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), are on the case. They’ll need to meet up with the mysterious White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) to get the plutonium, while being overseen by CIA assassin August Walker (Henry Cavill). And what does ex-MI6 superspy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) – returning from the previous installment – have to do with all of this? If you’ve seen any of the other Mission: Impossible movies, you know what to expect. A series of complications ruin meticulously designed plans, which eventually lead to shootouts, car chases, motorcycle chases, helicopter chases and Tom Cruise showing the world he has a death wish, as he performs one absurd over-the-top stunt after another. In previous Mission: Impossible films there’s usually been one big stunt that Cruise performs. In Fallout, he HALO jumps out of a plane, hangs off the side of a helicopter, and climbs up a sheer cliff face. And these are just some of the impressive feats of derring-do that Cruise displays.
 
Returning from Rogue Nation, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie sets everything in motion with aplomb, and his action set pieces are amazing, next-level stuff that put him at the top of the line of action directors. But why am I so thoroughly bored by everything that happens? I love action movies — there’s nothing more cinematic than a well-executed set piece. The real problem is that I don’t care one whit about Ethan Hunt and whether or not he’s going to survive. I get that for these movies to work you don’t want your main character to be too complicated, but Ethan hunt has nothing going on. I mean even in the worst Bond movies, Bond is quippy. Hunt’s defining characteristics are that he’s loyal, good at everything, and he misses his wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan). Recent entries have given him an “I’m too old for this shit” world-weariness that adds some humor, but I just find it a desperate attempt to give the character a flaw. And if these movies could really just stop trotting out Michelle Monaghan to give Ethan some emotional connection to whatever mission he’s on, I’d really appreciate it. And it’s odd that Ethan Hunt is so boring, because Tom Cruise is a brilliant actor with charisma to spare. It just seems like he’s on autopilot with this character — except when he’s trying to show how he’s immortal by doing some very impressive death-defying stunt.
 
The rest of the cast, on the other hand, is clearly having a ball. Henry Cavill’s CIA assassin is a good foil for Cruise; he’s just a brute working as a blunt instrument, smashing his way through the film. It’s just fun to see him destroy everything he comes into contact with. Cavill also gets the best line in the whole movie where he yells about how complicated everything is getting (which could function as a critique on the franchise as a whole). Rebecca Ferguson continues to be awesome, as she reprises her role from Rogue Nation, even though she doesn’t get as much to do here as she did in that film. Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg don’t get a whole lot to do except run around and try to stop bombs from detonating — they’ve been playing these roles for so long that they could do it in their sleep. Sean Harris also returns from Rogue Nation and continues the grand clichéd tradition of hyper-literate villains who talk a big game of bringing down the current world order and engineering peace through chaos … and I just fell asleep typing that sentence. Harris is fine, but the character is annoying.
 
Mission: Impossible – Fallout boasts truly impressive action, which puts it up a notch higher than most movies. Had I actually cared about anything that was happening in the film, I’d be bowing down at the feet of this movie; as it stands, the series still hasn’t solved its Ethan Hunt problem, and at this point it likely never will.
 
Two and a half out of Four Stars.