Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Mission: Impossible – Fallout was another Tom Cruise, 90s-era, over-the-top-action film that focused on great stunts, car chases, and visuals instead of an immersive story. This summer held promise for an intense and entertaining action film that might be remembered after the explosion of Avengers: Infinity War, yet every blockbuster I saw was a sour disappointment or an addition to a series too careful to commit to anything special. I thought this film would be different, but other than the amazing practical stunts and attention to action, its story was a basic excuse to create over-complicated conflict with spies.

The characters have concrete chemistry built into their lines and performances because of their previous films, and the main conflict comes from this, but they never find their breaking point. Time after time, there are scenes where they have to choose between saving a friend or completing the mission, and the execution of these choices are the greatest narrative aspects of this film. These choices build up on each other, but there was no high stakes or threats of Ethan Hunt falling down to his breaking point. All the shots in the trailers promising him becoming a corrupt agent are either him playing a scheme to get someone to confess information or just scenarios playing inside his head. The story also fails to hide the identity of this mysterious “John Larke” that the action and conflict would be twice as intense and gripping if Larke was never unknown. The writers tried to hide him within the story—it is so obvious who it is that even the trailers point it out—and the reveal is a predictable and unnecessarily complicated scene of everyone backstabbing everyone else until Larke somehow gets away. There are too many scenes where the writers sacrifice credibility and character development by making the characters predict other spies’ plans before they happen, yet then those spies predict the other spy predicting and predict his counter-plan, and sometimes the original spy predicts his counter-plan being predicted and makes another one. Why is it so complicated? Why did the writers not create a fist-fighting brawl between the two characters instead of them pretending to be mad until they win, but then not winning in reality? This is probably the common theme through most of this series, but it left me aggravated and unsatisfied with my own knowledge of what was happening, and that is because of what the audience is given compared to what the characters truly know.

I think the biggest problems the recent Mission: Impossible films have is that the camera follows Ethan Hunt to make the audience think they know what he is experiencing, and it focuses on other characters to add weight to subplots and add the power of the antagonist, but then pulls back when Ethan is acting his schemes so their reveal comes as a surprise. Again, there is one point in this film where the antagonist pretends to fall for the trap and then traps the trap, so not only did Ethan and his team know about the scheme, but also the antagonist… so the only people with no knowledge of any scheme was the audience. Sure, it gave me two twists, one good and the other completely ridiculous, but now I cannot trust the camera since it will only lie to me when Ethan is winning. There are several scenes where his character is about to break and the bad guys are winning, but then Ethan pulls out his supporting characters that know his perfect plan and were tricking us the whole time. There is no true desperateness or real emotional breakdowns in this film until the halfway point. The scene where he is running on rooftops after failing his ‘perfect plan’ is fantastic, he is on the cusp of failure, which will cost millions of lives, and the camera work excels in this moment. The film evolves tremendously after that scene, for the first time Ethan and his team are behind and they have to catch up. The camera is no longer lying to the audience and we are with them as they struggle to complete a mission that is seemingly impossible; there was true energy and excitement then, it just took half of the film to get there.

What I keep hearing from critics is how fantastic the “bathroom fight scene” is, and it is very well done, but I could not help but think that it is just a small taste of what Korean and Japanese action movies do every year, and those films include fight scenes for the entire film instead of just two minutes. It is a step in the right direction, following the paths of John Wick and Atomic Blonde, but still has not satisfied my desire. The action is great, and how the fight scenes and car chases evolve to the next step of intensity is clever and based on characters’ choices, which I loved, but when the espionage begins is when this film falls flat. Because of the trailers and the hype growing from other critics, I was expecting this film to be the next classic action-film. Sadly, both the trailers and critics are misleading; it is a great addition to the Mission: Impossible series with fantastic stunts, but it is nowhere close to The Raid films or Mad Max: Fury Road.

Also, there is an underlying theme of religion that amounts to nothing. I do not know why the writers added this aspect, but several scenes continually refer back to religious scenery, cities, and traditions. Even chase scenes end up in the middle of Mass and the score has Gregorian chants. I do not know what these references are trying to reveal, most likely the theme of a possible apocalypse because of the missing plutonium bombs, but there is no further revelation with these symbols.

Story Rating: 6/10

Character Rating: 5/10