With its latest installment the Mission : Impossible series is in the discussion of great franchises. We’re six movies in and even at its lowest point they are still better than most of the action movies we get every year and I think that Mission: Impossible-Fallout shows that there is no sign of slowing down. When you look at films in the James Bond series or the Star Wars saga, the driving force behind their longevity are the characters behind them, but for the IMF it runs on Tom Cruise and he is more than it really needs.
Fallout picks up where Rouge Nation left off, in a world a little less stable with Solomon Lane ( Sean Harris) out of the picture. Since his capture his previous group the Syndicate has become something different, now calling themselves the Apostles and still hell bent on creating a new world. When Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team find out they are trying to obtain nuclear weapons they devise a plan to stop them. With the help of Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) it almost works, but Hunt makes a choice and the bad guys get away with what they came for. Having to right their wrong Hunt and his team are joined by August Walker (Henry Cavill), a C.I.A. operative who is ordered to go along in case Hunt gets into another difficult fix. Things though never go as planned, but Hunt is always ready to do what it takes and what follows is a complex game of cat and mouse as the best the Impossible Mission Force has to offer once again try to save the world.
Where once this series was about the cool gadgets, because all spy movies should have cool gadgets, this series is far from that now. Sure there is still the scan a guy’s face and wear it like a mask, but the true driving force is the action now, or the one upping of the action from the previous films. Cruise is quite simply not human, forget about his age, name another actor that does the things he does for his art. He is no longer sliding along a wood floor in his socks and underwear, his days now are spent hanging from a cliff or a helicopter and even learning to fly said helicopter to make the shot as real as possible. I for one am in awe of him for that as well as Christopher McQuarrie who also wrote and directed the previous film Rouge Nation, want you to have no doubt that he is doing everything you see him doing by placing cameras everywhere to catch all the best angles.
For me this series has gone from one I enjoyed seeing to one I wouldn’t want to be without, I think we should have a new Mission : Impossible film every three years and like Cruise in so many of his movies I would run out to see them all. You can come for the action, but McQuarrie makes sure the substance is there as well with a good old fashioned spy story that will have you smiling through its runtime. I just loved this film and I love Tom Cruise for doing what he does to make them so special. So accept this mission and tell everyone about it , because this might be the best one in a series that seems to be getting better with age.
