For the love of cinema, Tom Cruise is back. He is running, jumping, flying, kicking, and hanging around the cliffs of mortal danger once again. In Mission: Impossible—Fallout, the 56-year-old actor defies the laws of age once more to show us such physicality that he can give an entire generation of men #LifeGoals.
The bodily presence of Cruise is both - comfort food for its competent familiarity, and a rousing amendment to the CGI led blockbuster cosmos. The star is famous for putting himself in danger by insisting on doing his own stunts, and this doggedness also makes the action so tactile that it clumps your breath. So much so that it makes you wonder whether he is actually putting his life at stake for us, our entertainment. (As publicity materials told us, he broke his ankle during a rooftop leap which shut down production for several weeks). With Cruise, the M:I series elevates itself once again over typical genre fair.
The franchise has witnessed the arrival and departure of multiple directors: Brian De Palma, then John Woo, JJ Abrams, Brad Bird, and Christopher McQuarrie who showed commanding showmanship in Rogue Nation (2015). For the first time, the franchise has repeated its director, and by bringing McQuarrie back, it also builds a direct sequel, pitching several characters from the previous film. Not only Hunt’s loyal mates Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) are back, so is his superior, Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin). To stir the cauldron further, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) is back with his terror scheme, and to add romantic friction, MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) returns with her feline agility.
The plot is cheerfully foggy as usual, with double and triple crosses, and dollops of exposition (mostly mouthed by Baldwin’s Hunley). Three globes of plutonium are missing, and a terror group called the Apostles are planning to blow up the world. Now it’s on IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agent Ethan Hunt and his team to save the world.
McQuarrie who also wrote the script doesn’t bother much with logical fluidity of the plot, but he invests the film’s globetrotting action with stakes that propel the film. At the very beginning, Hunt faces an ethical dilemma like the trolley problem, when he saves his mate at the cost of losing plutonium globes to terrorists.
Not only does Ethan have to find the bomb globes before they go off, he also has to deal with his unwelcome partner, CIA assassin August Walker played by the beautifully decorous Henry Cavill. Together, they land the film in a valley of simmering possibilities, flirting with manly nudges. Hunt is constantly inflamed by his younger and stronger partner Walker, and both bicker like would-be partners.
Mission: Impossible—Fallout shows its self-awareness by putting a three-way fight in a men’s washroom. Not only does the combat become a dance of muscular poise, breaking walls and mirrors, it also teases the audience when these three men in a bathroom stall are hounded by a group of eager men, quite obviously aroused.
This fight, otherwise a common occurrence in other films, also turns out special because it shows off a clean choreography while making participants vulnerable to blows and kicks. It’s not a straight fight to finish, there is struggle, there is the idea of rising up, and finally winning with whatever means available at ones end.
McQuarrie employing Robert Elswit’s camera and Eddie Hamilton’s cutting skills makes the action sequences grand and grander while never losing the intricacies within each. The fights always have a twist in their progression, the chases are always filled with strange turns, and a nifty detailing by a cut or a momentary shot make the action sequences not a cheat sheet but a trail of excitement that our eyes obediently follow. So be it speeding through the zip-zap-zoom traffic at Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, or following a loony helicopter through the mountains, they’re designed with cinematic sophistication that knows what it takes to deliver a clean spectacle to take your breath away.
Ethan Hunt is not your James Bond, the suave bourgeois British dreamboat, but an everyday American who relies purely on brazen self-confidence. His brash energy, his mantra “I’ll figure it out” while flinging himself into the jaws of death is a testament to the willingness of popular cinema to grit its teeth, and deliver dizzying entertainment.
Mission: Impossible—Fallout won’t leave the visual impression that De Palma offered when the series kickstarted in 1996, nor will it change the course of cinema history, but it is unquestionably the most thrilling entry in the series. The way it arrests you in its frantic action, very few films can. And Cruise grinning, running and anchoring it all with a human efficiency shows why he’s a star in a block of bulbs.
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder).
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