Certificate 12A, 147 minutes
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Stars: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames
Mission: Impossible – Fallout opens with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, The Mummy) and Julia (Michelle Monaghan) apparently having a wedding ceremony in a remote, if beautiful, location. There is only one other person present, apart from, the couple, the man officiating the ceremony. Then the vows the man is saying get really weird and Hunt starts protesting them. The man officiating – who turns out to be Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) – then tells Hunt that he should have killed him when he had the chance. A nuclear explosion happens in the near distance and the blast wave from it vaporises the couple. Hunt then starts awake in Belfast.
Your Mission – Should You Choose to Accept It
This was, of course, a dream. There is a knock on a door and Hunt goes to open it. Outside in the rain is a mostly unseen figure. After an exchange of code phrases, the figure hands hunt a package and leaves. Inside the package is a book, Homer’s Odyssey. Inside the book is what looks like an old-fashioned reel-to-reel player, but it’s a little bit more modern than that. The player requires a blood sample in order to work and it plays a video.
The video’s narrator says that ever since Solomon Lane was captured two years ago – the events of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation – many of the former members of the Syndicate have been hunted down and killed but there are many still alive, their identities unknown. These remaining members have formed a new network and they are calling themselves The Apostles, and they do terrorism for hire, such as a recent smallpox attack in the Kashmir which potentially endangered a huge percentage of the world’s population, given its location on the borders of India and the People’s Republic of China.
The Apostles are working for a man called John Lark, about which nothing other than the name, probably an alias, is known. Lark is an anarchist whose goal is to destroy the current world order. Lark has acquired the services of a nuclear scientist, Nils Debruuk (Kristoffer Joner), who was fired for his extremist views on religion. Together with three plutonium cores stolen from Russia, Debruuk will be able to build Lark three man-portable nuclear devices.
Hunt and Benji (Simon Pegg, Ready Player One) are in Berlin at night, waiting to meet someone who is going to sell them the plutonium cores. Luther (Ving Rhames) is in the van and Benji is fretting. He would like to be in the van himself at that point in time. The deal starts going down well enough but all the equipment in the van goes down, including the comms. Not that Hunt or Benji know this and, when Luther opens the van door, a gun is pointed at his face. With Luther not bringing the money for the cores as requested, things start getting very tense, then the arms dealer and his bodyguards are all shot. A voice claims that they are the Apostles, and one of them appears with a gun to Luther. They demand the cores in exchange for letting Luther live. Hunt doesn’t hand over the cores, but does save Luther – and during the distraction, the cores are all stolen.
In a hospital room there is a news report on the television being given by Wolf Blitzer (played by himself). Three nuclear explosions have destroyed Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca. Nils Debruuk is in the hospital bed, injured. He is told that he was in a car accident, and that this was two weeks ago. Luther and Hunt are there, and they want Debruuk to unlock his phone. He agrees, but only on the condition that Lark’s manifesto is read live on air, also quoting from it himself, there cannot be peace without suffering, that great suffering leads to great peace and that the greater the suffering the greater the peace. Blitzer starts reading the manifesto, and Debruuk unlocks the phone. At which point the walls of hospital room collapse, revealing it to be in a hanger, and elsewhere is the news studio. Blitzer is Benji in a latex mask.
All this was a very long – as in James Bond terms of long – pre-credit sequence.
Dealing with the Threat
Hunt is at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Alex Hunley (Alec Baldwin) is there; they are going to intercept John Lark in Paris before he can meet with the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), an arms dealer who is going to sell him the plutonium cores. Before the plane can leave, the CIA’s Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) arrives, accompanied by August Walker (Henry Cavill) – who has that infamous moustache. Sloane stops the plane from leaving – it’s the CIA’s plane and, after the IMF lost the plutonium cores, she wants Walker, of the Special Activities Division, to accompany Hunt. Hunley may prefer a scalpel but Sloane prefers a hammer.
Hunt and Walker go to Paris together to find Lark and intercept him, then go find the White Widow. This does not go entirely to plan and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, Life) turns up as well, working again but she refuses to say who she’s actually working for. Which does cause a clash. Solomon Lane is broken free of custody and the plutonium cores are still at large – and they would appear to be in the nuclear weapons Debruuk constructed. If the weapons are not found, there will be many, many deaths.
Reviewing Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Mission: Impossible – Fallout is available in 2D and 3D and the 2D version was the one watched. There are enough big action sequences that the 3D might have worked. As usual the film is, unlike the original series, very action-heavy; only the scene where Debruuk was conned is really true to how the team operated in the television series, although there is another minor scene rather late on. Fortunately, the action sequences are very good (and Tom Cruise is still performing all of his own stunts).
There are car chases, motorbike chases and helicopter chases, running through buildings and along roofs, gunfights and a skydive, dangling from ropes and on cliffs and an impressive, and destructive, fight in a bathroom. There’s even a bit of humour, mostly to do with the foot chase where Benji is directing Hunt – and this is because Benji did not have his tablet adjusted properly. Some of the directions were therefore a little out. Or didn’t allow for the true terrain. The various action set pieces are all done very nicely. There is a typical amount of globetrotting, in multiple different countries even if some locations are only visited very briefly (Belfast for one; it’s not really clear what Hunt was doing there).
Good Characters and Dialogue
Solomon Lane and John Lark are the two primary villains; although Lark’s identity is hidden it is revealed – or it can certainly be guessed – fairly early on. So there isn’t much in the way of true surprises, but there is still a massive life or death – for unknown numbers – situation that needs dealing with, and a definitely limited amount of time to do it. The characters are all pretty interesting – even the villains. Lark and Lane have similar goals yet there are rather different as villains. Action films tend to have one or at best two dimensional characters, counting on the action to hold the film together. Despite the vast amount of quality action in this film, the characters are often three dimensional, with different motivations and personalities.
Fallout is rather less standalone than any of the others in the film series to date, because of the references to Rogue Nation, the return of Solomon Lane (the first villain to return in a sequel) and Ilsa returning as well. Plus, audiences will need to know just who Julia is to make sense of the opening sequence. As a result, it’s a good idea to have seen Rogue Nation before Fallout, or some of the references may not make sense. Mission: Impossible – Fallout is an impressive, fun and surprisingly multi-dimensional film that is definitely recommended.
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