Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) Review

"I'm jumping out a window!"

-Ethan Hunt

After a mission goes wrong because of a decision made by Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), a group of terrorists get their hands on enough plutonium to make three nuclear bombs.  Ethan and his team set out to recover the plutonium, but they are forced to take CIA agent, August Walker (Henry Cavil), with, who is much more brutal than Ethan and has no problem sacrificing innocent lives.  Also tied up in the mess is an old friend of Ethan's and a former MI6 agent, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), an arms dealer known as the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), and the villain from the previous film, Soloman Lane (Sean Harris), who all have schemes and motives of their own.  With multiple groups and individuals on a collision course of destruction, it's up the Ethan and the few people he chooses to trust to stop the terrorists and prevent the fallout.

I will be getting into spoilers below, so quickly I will say that Fallout is a really good movie and a worthy addition to the Mission: Impossible series.  However, it is overrated and is certainly not the best film in the series.  It's worth seeing, but don't set your expectations too high.  It's no Ghost Protocol.

What Works:

The best villain of the Mission: Impossible is Owen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) from the third movie and it isn't close.  But Henry Cavil manages to take a respectable second place rather easily.  He is probably the best developed villain of the series and has excellent motivation.  One of the problems I have with Rogue Nation is that the villains are supposed to be an evil version of the IMF (Impossible Mission Force), so it would make sense that their leader would be an evil version of Ethan Hunt.  Solomon Lane is not that in any way, shape, or form and, in my opinion, he is the weakest part of that film.  Fallout finally gives us our evil Ethan, with August Walker.  He's bigger and badder, brutal, but smart.  Cavil does a great job and is one of the highlights of the film.

The action scenes are all around awesome.  The technical aspects of the film, especially in the action scenes, are fantastic and we get some truly memorable sequence, with the helicopter chase and resulting fight, as well as the Paris chase being the highlights.  It's some really impressive filmmaking.

The scene where Ethan, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), who is pretending to be Wolf Blitzer, trick one of Walker's men into giving them information is fantastic.  They almost had me fooled and I was really on board with the direction they were taking the story, but learning it was all fake was also really awesome.  Tom Cruise does a great job of selling his anger and Blitzer's cameo was memorable.

The movie also had some really great twists and turns in the story and was genuinely surprising at times.  The two best were the scenes where we learn that Ethan, his team, and his boss (Alec Baldwin) all knew about what Walker was up to and the reveal was fantastic.  I certainly didn't see it coming.  And the inclusion of Julia (Michelle Monaghan) from the 3rd and 4th movies in the end game was shocking and a great twist.  

What Sucks:

This film is long and it is complex.  There are a lot of different characters with a lot of different motivations, which I like.  But I do think this one was needlessly complex, especially with the White Widow storyline.  I enjoyed the nod to the first film, but I found this subplot to be unnecessary and it really didn't end up going anywhere.

Fallout also has a ton of exposition dialogue.  Some of the exposition I felt was unnecessary.  I don't know why we had to go into so much detail about the Apostles.  They didn't end up being that important to the story and it would have been simpler to keep calling them the Syndicate.  The larger point is that this movie was needlessly complicated.  It had too much stuff jammed in and some of it felt unnecessary.

Finally, I have some issues with the 3rd act of the film and I compare it to The Phantom Menace, which is not a good thing.  Both movies have multiple set pieces and stories going on at the same time, which is fine if they are all interesting.  Unfortunately, in both movies, I only found one to be engaging.  The Darth Maul duel in The Phantom Menace was great, but any time we cut to one of the other stories, I lost interest rapidly.  The same is true here.  I loved the helicopter chase and fight between Ethan and Walker, but watching Luther and Julia disarm a bomb did nothing for me.  Benji and Ilsa running around looking for a bomb got repetitive quickly and their fight with Solomon didn't do much for me either.  I strongly dislike Solomon as a character and really just wanted him and his story out of this movie.  So every time we cut to Ethan, I was having a blast, but would quickly lose my interest with the rapid cutting between scenes.  You either need to make all of your storylines engaging in the 3rd act or you need to cut some and just focus on one.

Verdict:

I'm really baffled at the reception to this film.  I see people saying it's the best Mission: Impossible film and even the best action movie of all-time.  I can't help wondering if we saw the same movie.  This is nowhere near the best action film of all time and I can't believe this is even a conversation people are having.  Ghost Protocol is far superior to this film and there is an argument that both III and Rogue Nation are better as well.  Don't get me wrong, I liked the film.  It's great on a technical level, the action sequences are pretty awesome, and Henry Cavil is a great villain, but it has some flaws in the pacing of the 3rd act and the film is needlessly complex.  It's certainly over-hyped and overrated, but Mission: Impossible - Fallout still has got it going on.

 8/10: Really Good