Mission: Impossible - Fallout is an absolutely action-packed and emotionally satisfying sixth installment of the franchise.
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Returning to write and direct his second Mission: Impossible film, Christopher McQuarrie delivers an absolutely action-packed and emotionally satisfying sixth installment of the franchise.
Fifty-six years old Tom Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt and his new impossible mission this time is to rescue the world from potential nuclear destruction.
Picking up the story from the last installment, ex-MI6 agent Solomon Lane, uncannily played by Sean Harris, has joined the Syndicate, an anarchist terror group that believes that in order for the world to change for the better, it must first be destroyed. To that end, Lane has acquired three plutonium bombs, which Hunt and his team of two, Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), have to acquire and defuse before the bombs countdown to zero.
As you’ve probably heard, word from the street is that this is one of the best, if not the best, Mission: Impossible film. Indeed. The action set pieces, which include French Connection-level chase sequences through the streets of Paris and London and a helicopter chase sequence in the air of Kashmir (probably shot in some Scandinavian country), are just thrillingly and death-defyingly well staged and executed.
But what truly elevates Fallout is that what’s at stake for Hunt is not just the end of the world, which, one must admit, is a plot device so commonly used that it’s become emotionally null, what’s at stake for Hunt is deeply personal. It’s his simultaneous love for his ex-wife Julia Meade-Hunt (Michelle Monaghan) and for Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) as well as for his friends.
Hunt’s relentless drive to save “humanity” is not an abstract Platonic goal, and McQuarrie demonstrates this multiple times by showing that for Hunt, the mission is not an end in itself. Individual lives still matter to Hunt, and this is the basis of Hunt’s humanity.
In our era of loud action franchises that ultimately ring hollow, Fallout actually make us care for the characters.
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