☆☆☆☆½
The comedian John Mulaney has a great bit about the high cost of movies. Expressing astonishment about enormous, nine-figure budgets, Mulaney says he'd be willing to spend ten bucks just to see that amount of cash – it would be more impressive than the movie itself.
I'd like to introduce John Mulaney to Mission: Impossible – Fallout, one of the only movies I've ever seen that looks like it must have cost $150 million to make, and that puts just about every cent up there on the screen. It's a big, grand movie, filled with stunts like parachuting into the City of Lights through a thunderstorm, and flying a burning helicopter at dizzying speeds while chasing another helicopter onto a glacier.
We've all seen movies that wear their nine-figure price tags like flashy designer clothes that call attention to themselves through high-priced casting or visual effects that trick the eye but not the brain. Mission: Impossible – Fallout wears its budget like an expensive, finely tailored suit, looking perfect and defying you to find anything wrong with the tailoring. There's no doubt in my mind that the movie is filled with digital effects – more, even, than Tom Cruise's publicists would want you to believe – but I was too busy admiring everything about it to notice; it all flows together with such fine craftsmanship you wouldn't even know where to look to find the flaws if they exist.
That's not to say that Mission: Impossible – Fallout is anything more or less than mindless summertime entertainment. The movie touches on some lofty and even challenging themes, offering up some troubling observations about the hair-trigger state of the world and its seemingly never-ending suffering at the hands of terrorists.
But this is also a movie that achieves the impressive feat of taking place in two world capitals that have been profoundly affected by terrorist acts themselves, yet making us forget entirely about the real-life events that happened there, and I can hardly think of higher praise for an action-adventure movie than that it is able to make us forget about the things that really trouble us, even if just for a couple of hours.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout wastes literally no time at all in giving Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) his new mission, which may, in the moment, seem labyrinthine in its complexity, and in fact is, but here is all you need to know about it: He has to find the object and get it back from the bad guys. Hitchcock would have been proud to see his beloved MacGuffin used to such perfect effect. All throughout the movie, there are moments where you worry Mission: Impossible – Fallout has become too complex to follow.
One scene in particular takes place deep under the streets of London and contains what must be at least a double double-cross (maybe a triple?), which is exponentially more complex than a regular old double-cross, and it's easy to sigh and say, "I give up." Which is exactly what you should do, as the movie's script, by director Christopher McQuarrie, isn't going to let you fall -- you'll have it figured out in no time.
Or maybe not.
After seeing the movie, I listened to a group of friends try to sort it all out, until one finally said, "All I know is that (insert actor's name here) was the bad guy." In the end, that's kind of all you need to know: Cruise is the good guy, surrounded by familiar faces like Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and, returning from Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Rebecca Ferguson. The others, well, they'll get sorted out in the end.
It was when Ferguson showed up that, I confess, I got a little worried. I had no idea what happened in the previous film, which I remembered liking, but could not recall in any detail. Not to worry, McQuarrie's got that covered, too, and deftly manages to further some of the backstory while filling in less-than-attentive viewers (like me) on exactly what they might need to recall from a movie they saw three years ago.
And none of it really matters, ultimately, because the most important thing is that you just keep your eye on whatever it is that the bad and good guys both want. As that thing bounces around (and even changes from moment to moment), it all builds off of a fantastic opening sequence in which Hunt has a very bad day by making a very bad decision – a decision no one can fault him for having made. Beginning there, the film dashes around Europe, hopping from Berlin to Paris to London to what is ostensibly the Indian state of Kashmir but is in fact the eye-popping terrain of Norway.
In the midst of it, Mission: Impossible – Fallout makes time for a very funny and unexpected sequence that will play right into the hands of "Fake News" believers, and ups the ante on the stakes at hand for Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force team. Mission: Impossible – Fallout ensures that what needs to be saved here is the fate of the entire globe, and that it's going to come down to those last few seconds to make it happen.
Whether it happens is hardly a question: Ethan Hunt hasn't been doing this for 20-plus years without reason. Neither has Cruise, who is, as ever, perfectly suited to the role. At this rate, it seems possible to expect him to be doing this for another couple of decades, well into his, ulp, 70s. That might seem unlikely, sure, but with Cruise and McQuarrie in charge, it doesn't seem like a mission that's at all impossible.
Viewed August 5, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1930
I'd like to introduce John Mulaney to Mission: Impossible – Fallout, one of the only movies I've ever seen that looks like it must have cost $150 million to make, and that puts just about every cent up there on the screen. It's a big, grand movie, filled with stunts like parachuting into the City of Lights through a thunderstorm, and flying a burning helicopter at dizzying speeds while chasing another helicopter onto a glacier.
We've all seen movies that wear their nine-figure price tags like flashy designer clothes that call attention to themselves through high-priced casting or visual effects that trick the eye but not the brain. Mission: Impossible – Fallout wears its budget like an expensive, finely tailored suit, looking perfect and defying you to find anything wrong with the tailoring. There's no doubt in my mind that the movie is filled with digital effects – more, even, than Tom Cruise's publicists would want you to believe – but I was too busy admiring everything about it to notice; it all flows together with such fine craftsmanship you wouldn't even know where to look to find the flaws if they exist.
That's not to say that Mission: Impossible – Fallout is anything more or less than mindless summertime entertainment. The movie touches on some lofty and even challenging themes, offering up some troubling observations about the hair-trigger state of the world and its seemingly never-ending suffering at the hands of terrorists.
But this is also a movie that achieves the impressive feat of taking place in two world capitals that have been profoundly affected by terrorist acts themselves, yet making us forget entirely about the real-life events that happened there, and I can hardly think of higher praise for an action-adventure movie than that it is able to make us forget about the things that really trouble us, even if just for a couple of hours.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout wastes literally no time at all in giving Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) his new mission, which may, in the moment, seem labyrinthine in its complexity, and in fact is, but here is all you need to know about it: He has to find the object and get it back from the bad guys. Hitchcock would have been proud to see his beloved MacGuffin used to such perfect effect. All throughout the movie, there are moments where you worry Mission: Impossible – Fallout has become too complex to follow.
One scene in particular takes place deep under the streets of London and contains what must be at least a double double-cross (maybe a triple?), which is exponentially more complex than a regular old double-cross, and it's easy to sigh and say, "I give up." Which is exactly what you should do, as the movie's script, by director Christopher McQuarrie, isn't going to let you fall -- you'll have it figured out in no time.
Or maybe not.
After seeing the movie, I listened to a group of friends try to sort it all out, until one finally said, "All I know is that (insert actor's name here) was the bad guy." In the end, that's kind of all you need to know: Cruise is the good guy, surrounded by familiar faces like Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and, returning from Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Rebecca Ferguson. The others, well, they'll get sorted out in the end.
It was when Ferguson showed up that, I confess, I got a little worried. I had no idea what happened in the previous film, which I remembered liking, but could not recall in any detail. Not to worry, McQuarrie's got that covered, too, and deftly manages to further some of the backstory while filling in less-than-attentive viewers (like me) on exactly what they might need to recall from a movie they saw three years ago.
And none of it really matters, ultimately, because the most important thing is that you just keep your eye on whatever it is that the bad and good guys both want. As that thing bounces around (and even changes from moment to moment), it all builds off of a fantastic opening sequence in which Hunt has a very bad day by making a very bad decision – a decision no one can fault him for having made. Beginning there, the film dashes around Europe, hopping from Berlin to Paris to London to what is ostensibly the Indian state of Kashmir but is in fact the eye-popping terrain of Norway.
In the midst of it, Mission: Impossible – Fallout makes time for a very funny and unexpected sequence that will play right into the hands of "Fake News" believers, and ups the ante on the stakes at hand for Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force team. Mission: Impossible – Fallout ensures that what needs to be saved here is the fate of the entire globe, and that it's going to come down to those last few seconds to make it happen.
Whether it happens is hardly a question: Ethan Hunt hasn't been doing this for 20-plus years without reason. Neither has Cruise, who is, as ever, perfectly suited to the role. At this rate, it seems possible to expect him to be doing this for another couple of decades, well into his, ulp, 70s. That might seem unlikely, sure, but with Cruise and McQuarrie in charge, it doesn't seem like a mission that's at all impossible.
Viewed August 5, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1930
I agree with your comments here. Thought it was a great popcorn-crunching film. The only flaw I found was that Ethan Hunt kept apologizing all the way through for things he'd just brush off in the earlier films. I'd like to think that, for example, the policewoman would return in the next film and there's be continuity, but I'm not sure about that. But the adventures -- wow, and I like Ferguson's character a lot. I went back and watched the last two films, then saw this again. Holds up pretty well.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I liked about this installment of "Mission: Impossible" was that Ethan Hunt seemed recognizably human, and given how much violence he was seeing and his fear of hurting the wrong people, the apology to the police officer seemed like a nice touch to me. There was a lot of collateral damage in the movie, and this time around it seemed to really bother Ethan Hunt.
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