Mission: Rewatchable - 'Mission: Impossible - Fallout'
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to revisit all previous Mission: Impossible movies in advance of July 12's Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. Next up in the queue: 2018's Mission: Impossible - Fallout. This retrospective will self-destruct in 3... 2... 1...
Sometimes, a director makes a sequel to their big hit movie, and they just don't really have any new ideas, and they end up making something inferior to the original. But sometimes, a director makes a sequel to their big hit movie, and you realize that the first go-round was basically practice. It seems to happen primarily with directors whose work prior to these movies was a little smaller in scale - peeps like Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Raimi, Christopher Nolan, and Bryan Singer. My theory is that they round some kind of learning curb vis-Ã -vis wrangling a big production, and at the same time, because the first movie made money, they're given more creative freedom. Whatever the reason, in these cases, we get a sequel that is superior to its predecessor.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mission: Impossible - Fallout. It was writer/director Christopher McQuarrie's second Mission movie, making him the first filmmaker to ever helm more than one of these things. But it also gave him a chance to concoct even crazier action scenes while correcting Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation's biggest weakness - that being its milquetoast villain.
Honestly, the beginning of Fallout is a little sluggish. Our long-suffering protagonist, Ethan Hunt (still Tom Cruise, duh) has a nightmare where he and his ex-wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), are being married by Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), the big bad from Rogue Nation... and then there's a mushroom cloud in the not-too-far-off-distance and they're all incinerated. And now that we've gone a whole movie without thinking about Julia, who is such a boring character compared to Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), it just feels like we have no reason to care. Like, Ethan, my dude, you've been divorced for close to a decade now, and you've met someone else who's even better suited for you. Why you still sweatin' this, bruh?
Then they do the thing they've done a hundred times already and will do multiple times in this very film, where they use masks to trick someone into revealing valuable intel. Next, they set up August Walker (Henry Cavill), a CIA agent who Ethan is forced to take along on his latest assignment. Walker is immediately a dick to Ethan for no real reason and at first it seems like he's gonna be a pretty one-note character.
This leads to the first big TOM CRUISE IS OUT OF HIS GODDAMN MIND stunt of the movie, in which he does a HALO jump for really real. Thing is, the story calls for the jump to happen in the middle of a thunder storm. I don't know if this choice was made for practical purposes (e.g., to mask that Cavill did not do the insane high-altitude, low-open leap as Cruise) or because they thought Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane just wouldn't be exciting enough anymore or just to make the mission that much more impossible. Regardless, they couldn't have Tom Cruise jump through an actual lightening storm, because that's the kind of thing from which even Xenu cannot protect him. So they have all this CGI shit going on around Cruise, and it makes the entire jump look fake. It's the same problem they had with the underwater stuff in Rogue Nation.
And then, just when you're sitting there thinking "Uh-oh, I think they may have biffed this movie," along comes the bathroom fight.
Hol. Ee. Shit.
This fight scene is so good, it accomplished what multiple Superman movies could not: It made the world care about Henry Cavill.
Everything about the fight scene, from its choreography to the stunt work to the photography (the cinematographer this time out is regular Alex Garland collaborator Rob Hardy) and editing (welcome back, Eddie Hamilton), is perfect (not that the bathroom is a geographically complex space, but still, it's worth noting how they really give you layout of the room before the fight begins, so that later you can legitimately understand who's standing where). And like all of McQuarrie's best action scenes, this one is structured as a little story within the story. It has highs and it has lows, the latter often delivered in the form of tension-breaking little comedic moments, like Ethan realizing too late that their knocked-out prey has re-awakened, a certain instantly-iconic moment to which I'll circle back in a couple of paragraphs, and a shot of Ethan exhaustedly rolling his eyes after Walker gets knocked out and he realizes he's going to have to continue the fight on his own.
(I kinda mentioned this in my Rogue Nation re-watch, but to state it even more explicitly: You've got all these big action guys like The Rock and Vin Diesel running around now refusing to do anything that might make them look weak. Cruise recognizes that if Ethan shows fear and demonstrates physical enervation, the viewer will be all the more excited when he figures out some way to cleverly turn things around. Watching an invulnerable protagonist just isn't as fun as watching someone persevere despite getting their ass beat.)
And the stunt work! It may not be hanging off the side but a plane, but it's still extremely impressive. I cannot understate this enough: Yes, of course, they took safety precautions when they filmed this scene. But much like pro-wrestlers, the performers actually had to do some painful shit. Like, how did they throw this poor dude through a mirror? They threw him through a frickin' mirror. The surface would have been breakaway and the actor would have some padding wherever they could manage to hide it, but still. I don't see you volunteering to do it.
And then there's THAT moment, which Cavill infamously improvised:
I have been thinking about it for five years now, and I'm still not sure what makes Cavill "reloading" his fists great. But it obviously touched something in all of us, because it immediately became iconic. When Henry Cavill dies one day, some version of that .gif will be at the top of his obituary.
The scene even rewards a second viewing, when you know that Walker is actually 'John Lark,' the mysterious terrorist our heroes are hunting. Walker is characterized, from the moment of his introduction, as a trigger-happy human bazooka, in contrast with Ethan, the less-trigger-happy human scalpel. So it's not super obvious that he's fucking shit up on purpose the first time you watch it. But once you know his character's actual motives, you you can see all the ways in which he's sabotaging the operation: He calls attention to himself when they're about to attack the target, he "accidentally" destroys the computer than makes the face masks, and honestly, and there's a moment where he's knocked out only I'm fairly certain he's faking because he wants Ethan to be killed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z83IyEgxPrk
The movie really gets movin' after this fight, too. By the time it's over, Ilsa has re-entered the story. McQuarrie has figured out a reasonably-plausible way to give her and Ethan the same stand-offish tension they had in Rogue Nation (that reasonably-plausible way being that Ethan and Ilsa's romance apparently didn't work out, and so Ethan's back to not really knowing whose side she's on). And shortly thereafter, they introduce McQuarrie's second-best addition to the ensemble: Alanna Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby), a.k.a. 'The White Widow,' a black market arms dealer and the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave's character from the first movie. Kirby has charisma to burn, and she could have more or less phoned this performance in and still made it work. But she also mimics Redgrave's languid, coquettish deliveries from the Brian De Palma film. Good stuff.
The other returning characters also get excellent treatment. Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) are absent for about half the movie, but they both have big parts to play in the grand finale. Alec Baldwin reprises his role as Ethan's latest celebrity IMF boss, and while doesn't get to be especially funny this time, he does get a big death scene (how McQuarrie had the foresight to remove Baldwin from the franchise before he became a liability, I do not know). And Lane actually seems a lot more intimidating this time, because they gave him a big beard, thus ensuring he no longer resembles an adorable amphibian.
In fact, the only notable cast member who gets kinda screwed here is Angela Bassett as Walker's celebrity CIA boss. Bassett is always great, and casting her obviously lends the character a lot of gravitas she doesn't actually have on the page. Still, it might have been nice to give the poor woman even just, like, one memorable line of dialogue.
(Oh, I guess Jeremy Renner maybe also got screwed, because Brandt is nowhere to be found this time. So much for inheriting the franchise.)
Rogue Nation demonstrated that all you really need to make one of these movies work are decent characters to move us from set piece to set piece (of which there are terrific ones here, including a bike chase through the streets of Paris, the rooftop pursuit that resulted in Tom Cruise breaking his ankle, and, I probably don't have to say, the incredible, 99% practical helicopter battle at the end, which foretold Top Gun: Maverick's aerial action glory).
But I think Fallout probably has the best story of any Mission: Impossible movie to boot.
No, really! I mean, yeah, a lot of the specific plot contrivances are still pretty silly. But in the ways that matter most - i.e., emotional and thematic beats - McQuarrie does a superb job. The titular fallout refers to Walker's Thanos-esque plan (he's going to blow up a nuke which will cause starvation and drought which will result in a population decrease and a new world order), but it also refers to consequences:
The entire reason the bad guys manage to get ahold of a nuke in the first place is because Ethan prioritizes his team members' lives over completing their objective - so the whole movie is a consequence of his actions.
Ethan's marriage comes back to bite him in the ass when Walker specifically targets Julia.
Ethan's failed relationship with Ilsa comes back to bite him in the ass when she shows up and interferes with his hunt (no pun intended) for 'John Lark.'
Not killing Lane in Rogue Nation comes back to bite him in the ass when freeing Lane becomes the price of tracking down 'John Lark.'
Alanna represents a different kind of fallout, but she is an echo of Ethan's past decisions regardless.
On a larger, more existential level, Alec Baldwin's decision not to eradicate the IMF at the end of Rogue Nation comes back to bite him in the ass.
Walker articulates the theme in terms of his own motive. He's trying to convince Angela Bassett that Ethan is 'John Lark,' and she asks him why Ethan would flip over to the dark side. Walker replies: "They were believers in a cause, and when that cause turned out to be a lie, they turned and betrayed their masters. How many times has Hunt's government betrayed him, disavowed him, cast him aside? How long before a man like that has had enough?" Walker is actually describing himself (there's a similar scene with Jon Voight in the first movie).
And because we enjoy the characters and the theme of repercussions is hum-hum-hummin' along, the emotional moments are all the more effective. By the end, we understand why Ethan is still concerned about Julia. We still want him and Ilsa to live happily ever after. We don't want any of our friends to die - not even Alec Baldwin! (Incidentally, that's also how McQuarrie wrings extra tension out of Walker's betrayal - he lets the audience know that Walker is the big bad wwwwaaayyyy before the other characters figure it out, we makes for a lot of dramatic irony. It's like the exact opposite of what McQuarrie did in his screenplay for The Usual Suspects.)
Not for nuthin' does Fallout remain the apex of this particular IP (and yes, I am including Dead Reckoning). It's possible it can't be topped. It will always fly thousands of miles above its peers, like Tom Cruise getting ready to jump from a ridiculously tall height.