Mission Impossible: Fallout Review
Historically I have avoided the last few Mission Impossible films (for the sake of my sanity, henceforth "M:I") as I've always seen them as the poor man's Bond flick (plus it starred the unpalatable Cruise, so so in most films unless he thinks outside the box like Collateral or Edge of Tomorrow). However, Fallout has been getting rave reviews, 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, talk of it being "one of the greatest action movies ever made" (see the film's Wiki where that quote manages to survive Wiki's violent moderators looking for false statements) which piqued my interest.
So last weekend, I binged the previous 2 films in the series - Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation which I would summarise as achingly average for the first one and much better but derivative for the second. Ghost Protocol featured some interestingly staged action - a chase in a sandstorm, a fight in a multistorey carpark with cars being shuffled around by machines, the now famous scaling of the tallest building in the world Burj Khalifa - but all of this was suffocated by a dull as dishwater plot (stolen nukes - Austin Powers killed that plot 20 years ago) and a villain so achingly transparent he probably features in less than 1 minute of the script and when he does you wouldn't even notice him.
Rogue Nation does a much better job, although it probably worked better for me by leaning more heavily into Bond than Hunt using the Syndicate (read SPECTRE), who have been launching multiple attacks across the globe, headed by a Blofeld-esque figure. The acton was better than Ghost Protocol, the villain has more screen presence (although how anyone didn't think Sean Harris, with that voice and turtleneck would turn to evil is anyone's guess), and it better mixes low key and high key action such as a tense multi assassin standoff in a opera versus a smash grab car chase at the midpoint.
With the escalation in quality and the resounding applause that Fallout was getting I went in with high hopes...which after an about an hour and a half (with an hour left to go) of ever escalating in volume action, got dashed on the rocks.
Fallout starts out very promising, with the M:I films the experts of the exposition dump, using the "Your mission if you choose to accept it..." plot dumps setting up the action to come like a video game mission briefing. Again stolen nuclear weapons (snore) but with links to the secretive SPECTRE-like villains of Rogue Nation (yay!). This moves to a shadowy meeting and call me cold hearted but a monumental fuck up by the M:I team which is the only reason the film can exist. But anyway, in all these action films, you have to suspend your disbelief but even this mistake took me out of the flick instantly. From this mistake, the M:I guys are yet again called into question, but this time by the CIA, who set their top assassin, played by a hulking infamously moustachioed Henry Carvill who looks like he is constantly ready to punch his way out of his shirt, to keep tabs on Cruise and co.
The action starts out measured and stylish - a one shot computer assisted skydive into a storm, a brutal yet funny bathroom brawl playing out like a more balletic and comic version of Casino Royale's opening scenes. But by the midpoint, after an extended and seemingly ever extending car chase in Paris, my patience was tested. This was through a combination of factors, one of which may not have been the film's fault, which was the sound levels. Now either the cinema itself ramped up the volume or the maker's of the film thought the best way to portray intensity was with a cacophony of noise be it bullets, car smashing, Cruise smashing, whatever. It just gave me a headache.
And unfortunately, the plot didn't distract me from the headache. For a vast majority of the film it felt like we were seeing the greatest hits from this franchise and others - multiple highly telegraphed mask fake outs including one very early on which is almost beat for beat identical to one in M:I 2, a car chase mid point that just goes on and on, finishes, then goes on some more and does nothing you haven't seen before, just louder, a more interesting on foot chase in London, and the typical ticking time bomb finale. These scenes are undoubtably well shot and inventive in their cinematography, but it can't take away from the fact that the plot is minimal and the scenes are often just rehashes. If the film had 30-40 minutes taken out of it I think the barnstorming finale would've had a much greater impact on me, rather that a stronger headache.
When the plot does kick in it is the usual betrayals, mask swicheroos, and shadowy chats but barely any of it comprehensible. A "twist" at the end of the 2nd act makes less and less sense the more you think about it. There is a massively unnecessary plot strangulation involving an illegal arms broker with malleable loyalties, whom are heroes gain an audience with by using exactly the same gambit in Ghost Protocol ("maybe she hasn't seen the guy she was meant to meet before?")
The cast are all excellent however, although none are really pushed out of their comfort zones. Cruise is in Cruise control with the role but not in a bad way. Ethan Hunt isn't much of a character, just a shining beacon of genuine heroism but Cruise gives it his all. Whether it is hanging from a helicopter or throwing himself across roof tops (which apparently broke him a rib), Cruise goes for it like it is his last minute on earth. The rest of the M:I team do their thing, Pegg in particularly has evolved nicely from comic relief tech guy to a proper out in the field agent. One thing this and the last M:I film do better than Bond of late is by making more fully fleshed out autonomous female characters rather than the doting Bond girls of yore (Lea Seydoux whilst had a hard edge in Spectre was far too easy to fall for Bond and become a damsel in distress, something the ladies of Fallout would titter at). Henry Carvill is my favourite part of the film, as you get a real sense of him breaking out of his dull Superman role with a character who even though is on the good guy's side manages to play the spy-game in his own way to bring him into conflict with Cruise. Carvill is no boy scout any more. The villain of the piece is, whilst sinister sounding, has his motives remaining as obtuse as ever, all about action rather than reason, he talks the big talk with intonations of impending doom and apocalypse but mixed in with apparent greater good chat without ever saying how that can be.
I am genuinely surprised at the level of adulation Fallout has received. This is not one of the best action films ever made - Mad Max: Fury Road a film I feel is comparable in terms of intensity runs Fallout out of town with inventiveness and a knowledge of when to take its foot of the accelerator, slow down and develop character, or mix up the action levels. I keep hearing the M:I films compared to Bond, even in this blog post, but again I don't think they are comparable - the intensity of the action on display in Fallout is ten times bigger than what normally happens in a Bond flick. A Bond flick at its best mixes in investigation, some romance, bursts of over the top action, a memorable villain and exotic locales. The M:I films aren't aiming for this, and that's not the issue - the issue here is that Fallout is like playing darts with a bazooka - yeah you've hit the target, but the target is in pieces on the floor and the spectators have their hands over their head just asking you to stop and try something a bit less noisy next time.
Historically I have avoided the last few Mission Impossible films (for the sake of my sanity, henceforth "M:I") as I've always seen them as the poor man's Bond flick (plus it starred the unpalatable Cruise, so so in most films unless he thinks outside the box like Collateral or Edge of Tomorrow). However, Fallout has been getting rave reviews, 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, talk of it being "one of the greatest action movies ever made" (see the film's Wiki where that quote manages to survive Wiki's violent moderators looking for false statements) which piqued my interest.
So last weekend, I binged the previous 2 films in the series - Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation which I would summarise as achingly average for the first one and much better but derivative for the second. Ghost Protocol featured some interestingly staged action - a chase in a sandstorm, a fight in a multistorey carpark with cars being shuffled around by machines, the now famous scaling of the tallest building in the world Burj Khalifa - but all of this was suffocated by a dull as dishwater plot (stolen nukes - Austin Powers killed that plot 20 years ago) and a villain so achingly transparent he probably features in less than 1 minute of the script and when he does you wouldn't even notice him.
Rogue Nation does a much better job, although it probably worked better for me by leaning more heavily into Bond than Hunt using the Syndicate (read SPECTRE), who have been launching multiple attacks across the globe, headed by a Blofeld-esque figure. The acton was better than Ghost Protocol, the villain has more screen presence (although how anyone didn't think Sean Harris, with that voice and turtleneck would turn to evil is anyone's guess), and it better mixes low key and high key action such as a tense multi assassin standoff in a opera versus a smash grab car chase at the midpoint.
With the escalation in quality and the resounding applause that Fallout was getting I went in with high hopes...which after an about an hour and a half (with an hour left to go) of ever escalating in volume action, got dashed on the rocks.
Fallout starts out very promising, with the M:I films the experts of the exposition dump, using the "Your mission if you choose to accept it..." plot dumps setting up the action to come like a video game mission briefing. Again stolen nuclear weapons (snore) but with links to the secretive SPECTRE-like villains of Rogue Nation (yay!). This moves to a shadowy meeting and call me cold hearted but a monumental fuck up by the M:I team which is the only reason the film can exist. But anyway, in all these action films, you have to suspend your disbelief but even this mistake took me out of the flick instantly. From this mistake, the M:I guys are yet again called into question, but this time by the CIA, who set their top assassin, played by a hulking infamously moustachioed Henry Carvill who looks like he is constantly ready to punch his way out of his shirt, to keep tabs on Cruise and co.The action starts out measured and stylish - a one shot computer assisted skydive into a storm, a brutal yet funny bathroom brawl playing out like a more balletic and comic version of Casino Royale's opening scenes. But by the midpoint, after an extended and seemingly ever extending car chase in Paris, my patience was tested. This was through a combination of factors, one of which may not have been the film's fault, which was the sound levels. Now either the cinema itself ramped up the volume or the maker's of the film thought the best way to portray intensity was with a cacophony of noise be it bullets, car smashing, Cruise smashing, whatever. It just gave me a headache.
And unfortunately, the plot didn't distract me from the headache. For a vast majority of the film it felt like we were seeing the greatest hits from this franchise and others - multiple highly telegraphed mask fake outs including one very early on which is almost beat for beat identical to one in M:I 2, a car chase mid point that just goes on and on, finishes, then goes on some more and does nothing you haven't seen before, just louder, a more interesting on foot chase in London, and the typical ticking time bomb finale. These scenes are undoubtably well shot and inventive in their cinematography, but it can't take away from the fact that the plot is minimal and the scenes are often just rehashes. If the film had 30-40 minutes taken out of it I think the barnstorming finale would've had a much greater impact on me, rather that a stronger headache. When the plot does kick in it is the usual betrayals, mask swicheroos, and shadowy chats but barely any of it comprehensible. A "twist" at the end of the 2nd act makes less and less sense the more you think about it. There is a massively unnecessary plot strangulation involving an illegal arms broker with malleable loyalties, whom are heroes gain an audience with by using exactly the same gambit in Ghost Protocol ("maybe she hasn't seen the guy she was meant to meet before?")
The cast are all excellent however, although none are really pushed out of their comfort zones. Cruise is in Cruise control with the role but not in a bad way. Ethan Hunt isn't much of a character, just a shining beacon of genuine heroism but Cruise gives it his all. Whether it is hanging from a helicopter or throwing himself across roof tops (which apparently broke him a rib), Cruise goes for it like it is his last minute on earth. The rest of the M:I team do their thing, Pegg in particularly has evolved nicely from comic relief tech guy to a proper out in the field agent. One thing this and the last M:I film do better than Bond of late is by making more fully fleshed out autonomous female characters rather than the doting Bond girls of yore (Lea Seydoux whilst had a hard edge in Spectre was far too easy to fall for Bond and become a damsel in distress, something the ladies of Fallout would titter at). Henry Carvill is my favourite part of the film, as you get a real sense of him breaking out of his dull Superman role with a character who even though is on the good guy's side manages to play the spy-game in his own way to bring him into conflict with Cruise. Carvill is no boy scout any more. The villain of the piece is, whilst sinister sounding, has his motives remaining as obtuse as ever, all about action rather than reason, he talks the big talk with intonations of impending doom and apocalypse but mixed in with apparent greater good chat without ever saying how that can be.I am genuinely surprised at the level of adulation Fallout has received. This is not one of the best action films ever made - Mad Max: Fury Road a film I feel is comparable in terms of intensity runs Fallout out of town with inventiveness and a knowledge of when to take its foot of the accelerator, slow down and develop character, or mix up the action levels. I keep hearing the M:I films compared to Bond, even in this blog post, but again I don't think they are comparable - the intensity of the action on display in Fallout is ten times bigger than what normally happens in a Bond flick. A Bond flick at its best mixes in investigation, some romance, bursts of over the top action, a memorable villain and exotic locales. The M:I films aren't aiming for this, and that's not the issue - the issue here is that Fallout is like playing darts with a bazooka - yeah you've hit the target, but the target is in pieces on the floor and the spectators have their hands over their head just asking you to stop and try something a bit less noisy next time.
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