Mission: Impossible – Fallout

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE sequels now arrive with such regularity (every 4-5 years) that I can’t recall what number this one is.  Like THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, it’s become a very expensive serial.  Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt.  He and his team, a menagerie now reduced to Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), must exchange a rogue agent for stolen plutonium to prevent its use by a terrorist group known as The Apostles.

Brian De Palma’s 1996 screen take on Bruce Geller’s television series followed closely in the footsteps of Phil Alden Robinson’s sleeper hit, SNEAKERS—a light-footed spy thriller with touches of intrigue and comedy.  The genre shifted away from the cold-war sensibilities of Clancy/Le Carré in post-Schwarzenegger Hollywood, leaning more heavily on action and save-the-world plots.  Enter John Woo and an A-list of other action directors for the M:I sequels.

Not one to argue with a tentpole formula, Tom Cruise leapt into the chasm, opting to do his own stunts (wrong for all sorts of reasons) and here we are: Action sequences so intense and dizzying, the audience isn’t given time to think, “But why is there a long, external hose connecting his oxygen tank to his mask?  It seems as if the thing was designed with the sole purpose of getting caught on something.” But never mind…

The film achieves most of its near-intrigue by including elements recycled from De Palma’s smarter, inaugural entry in the franchise—conflicting priorities with a CIA agent (Henry Cavill as August Walker, the funniest cover name since Fat Bastard), an alluring, rich-as-shit broker played by a Vanessa—Kirby, in this case; the character is the grand-niece of the other Vanessa’s (Redgrave) Max.  The film contains every staple of every contemporary action film in the spy genre: the Deal Gone Bad, the Brokered Negotiation, the Nightclub Scene With Lasers, the Double-Cross and the Double-Double Cross.

And who thought it would be a good idea to cast Tom Cruise against Henry Cavill?  Two black holes of charisma for the price of one!  Cavill is unbelievably handsome, but that just adds to the placidity of his acting.  The film tries, desperately, to testosteronify Cruise’s Hunt—casting him betwixt Kirby’s White Widow and Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust.   But it doesn’t really work.  All the sexual tension could have been squared between Cavill and Cruise, but two black holes don’t make a shining star.

By contrast, what Christian Bale once described as Cruise’s “intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes” played well in De Palma’s M:I and Michael Mann’s COLLATERAL.  In both films, the story capitalized on Mr. Mapother’s soulless stare in characters appropriately lacking a moral center.  Watch the HBO documentary MANHUNT, about the CIA team that located Bin Laden, led by Marty Martin who was reportedly ejected from the Agency for, among other things, embezzling $6 million.  It’s a dirty job…  Ethan Hunt is played as an incorruptible man with an unwavering moral compass, when he should be less like Captain America and more like Vincent in Mann’s film.

Cruise tries his damnedest to make sense of his macho brand in the 21st century against the more affable personalities in Luther and Benji, the exhaustion of keeping up the façade now visible in his 56-year old face.  I’m not arguing here that he’s old, but that the brand he’s built around himself is an anachronism… an anachronism that worked for his character arc in Doug Liman’s EDGE OF TOMORROW, because he had a competing personality against whom to push (a no-bullshit Emily Blunt).

Aside from the familiar scaffolding, the film holds up well as an action piece, but the intrigue dissolves when we step outside the theater and read about the clandestine way 12 Russian military intelligence officers were caught in the act intefering in the 2016 U.S. Elections.  Truth isn’t just stranger than fiction, it’s also more terrifying and exhilarating… For the past year, it’s been the biggest show on Earth.  How do you compete with that?