Mission: Impossible

Very much a sequel to Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible – Fallout brings back both heroes and villains from the previous film. As we saw in Rogue Nation, the various other government agencies are still struggling to work with the IMF. This isn’t helped when three nuclear warheads slip through Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) hands in the opening action sequence and are about to be sold on the black market to a terrorist with delusions of grandeur.

Forced to work with CIA thug August Walker (Henry Cavill), Hunt and his team (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg both return) accept their assignment, but, as usually happens, things don’t go according to plan. Rebecca Ferguson and Sean Harris both return to reprise their roles from the last film as a potential love interest for Ethan and a villain harboring and even bigger boner for the spy who put him behind bars.

Although Jeremy Renner isn’t present here, the latest in the franchise includes callbacks to several of the earlier films and in some ways feels like a final chapter to the series (while still leaving the door open if Cruise and company wish to return).

Although it began a series of increasingly good summer blockbuster over the course of two decades, 1996’s relaunch of the television series of the same name as a theatrical film (which introduced the world to Tom Cruise‘s most successful ongoing character in IMF Agent Ethan Hunt) is problematic at best. Poorly plotted, including a huge fuck you to fans of the original series by turning the television show’s central hero (Peter Graves) into a greedy villain (Jon Voight) selling CIA secrets to the highest bidder, the film hasn’t aged well. Turning Jim Phelps into a villain would be like rebooting Superman into a coldblooded killer. What kind of an asshole would do that?

Opening with the death of an IMF team (Kristin Scott Thomas, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Emilio Estevez) and Ethan on the run from his former bosses who believe he is responsible, the film climaxes early on with a break-in at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It’s this sequence, and really only this sequence, that’s worth noting from the otherwise forgettable tale.

What makes my enjoyment of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation all the more surprising is I’m not the biggest fan of the plot-framing device McQuarrie chooses to recycle in planting our heroes on the outside of their agency working essentially as rogue agents to save the day for those not smart enough to listen to them (here played by Alec Baldwin). The series tried it once, with Brian De Palma‘s bastardization of the original series, with mixed results. The plot is so common the Bond franchise has used it multiple times (License to Kill, Quantum of Solace, Diamonds Are Forever to name three – none of which would be considered among the series’ best).