New Release! Missions Impossible: Fallout (2018) [No Spoilers]

No Spoilers! Read Away!!

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

The sixth movie in the Mission Impossible franchise, Mission Impossible: Fallout, does what it sets out to reasonably well. The only problem for me is that I wasn't overly interested in what it set out to do.

About a 18 months ago, I pulled a Mission Impossible marathon, watching all five of the previous films within the span of a few days. I found the series rather uneven, with only two of the five films being to my liking (the third and fifth, MI:3 and Rogue Nation, to be precise). Since this sixth entry was written and directed by the man who did the same for the previous entry, Rogue Nation, I was hopeful that it would be at least as good as that excellent spy action thriller. Those hopes rose a bit when I saw the overwhelmingly positive reviews pour in during the week leading up to the film's release.

I now have to say that, although the movie shows mastery of many of the important elements of action movies, the aspects beyond the pulse-pounding visual dynamics were lacking.

As with the other films in the series, Fallout keeps up with Ethan Hunt's Impossible Mission force in "real" time. We are now a little over two years after the events of the previous film, in which Hunt and his team stopped the nefarious Solomon Lane. Lane was a former British Secret Service operative who went rogue and started an entire organization - "The Syndicate" - of former spooks-turned-global-zealot/terrorists. Though Hunt captured Lane, the remnants of the Syndicate have coalesced into The Apostles, who are attempting to get their hands on three nuclear warheads with which they plan nothing good. Hunt and his team must try to track down the bombs while navigating the treacherous waters of various duplicitous agencies, including the C.I.A. and the U.K.'s MI6.

Cliffhangers? Check. Literally?! Check!! By the time this one
rolls around towards the end of the movie, I was mentally
checked out.

Where Rogue Nation stayed just on the right side of a plot being overly complex to the point of being shallow and meaningless, I found Fallout to cross that line. With various melding, merging, and overlapping double- and triple-crosses, what I believe was meant to be a sophisticated plot really just ends up being unnecessarily complicated. And like many such movies, this seems to have been used to cover up a complete lack of any well-developed emotional depth. Yes, the movie tries to offer some sort of emotional stakes for super-spy Ethan Hunt, but these are nothing that ever feel terribly genuine. Instead, the overwhelming majority of the film is given over to motorcycle chases, car chases, helicopter chases, and hand-to-hand combat scenes. These are all done extremely well, to be sure, but by the movie's end, I honestly didn't care much about anyone involved.

I will say that the acting is just fine. Rebecca Ferguson is once again very easy to like (as well as being easy on the eyes) as MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, and Henry Cavill cuts an imposing figure as CIA sledgehammer August Walker. All the other mainstays continue to be steady, with Simon Pegg standing out, as usual.

Fans of pure action movies will likely really enjoy this one. For my part, I need a little more substance to go with my flash. While I may go back and watch Rogue Nation at some point again in the future, I doubt I'll ever bother with a second viewing of Fallout. One time was plenty.