Mission: Impossible – Fallout – A Review – (PowerHouseCreatives Contest)

Mission: Impossible – Fallout – A Review

In this article, I am going to review the 2018 movie, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, starring Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill, and also co-starring several people with whom I have no familiarity. I am terrible with identifying movie stars by sight today, if they aren’t at the very top tier of popularity and their images aren't plastered everywhere on everything.

I’ll start off this review by saying that I have not seen even one of the preceding Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible films. Although I was made aware of all the truly outlandish stunts Tom Cruise is said to do himself, it’s never been enough to draw me to one of his Mission: Impossible movies. The last Tom Cruise movie that I had seen prior to Mission: Impossible – Fallout was Vanilla Sky in 2001.

Just now, looking at information from Wikipedia on this film, the director, Christopher McQuarrie, is the first director to direct more than one film in the franchise.

Reading further in the Wikipedia article we find there are two new sequels in the franchise, coming in 2021 and 2022; “both directed by McQuarrie.” They must like him. I don’t know why however, because if you take out the action scenes in this movie, what’s left is rather boring and even flirts with being ridiculously mundane.

I don’t know if anything was carried over to this film from the previous Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible episode, other than what is alluded; Tom’s character had messed up in the last film and let a terrorist group steal some plutonium. But the story itself – the plot – is one of the silliest plots they could have ever come up with, if there is any aim whatsoever at mimicking our world’s reality.

The first time I saw that Alec Baldwin had a role in the movie, I thought it must really be a comedy film. He plays Tom Cruise’s boss. I personally think it’s a big mistake to put Alec Baldwin in a movie that’s supposedly serious, because he’s is going to make people laugh just seeing him on the screen. It’s a bad move to cast him in this type of film, if you ask me.

We’re given the situation - a terrorist group has stolen plutonium, and Alec Baldwin, trying but failing to look serious, (which itself is funny), is bitching at Tom for his screw-up. It’s Tom Cruise’s character’s fault for not following agency procedure that led to the bad guys getting the plutonium.

Tom Cruise assumes the identity of a guy named Lark that wanted the plutonium to build nuclear bombs, but he ended up being killed by a female MI6 agent that also then tries to kill Tom Cruise and his associates, even though she is one of Tom Cruise’s character’s love interests. Tom backs into her motorcycle hard, nearly killing her before taking off again after the terrorists.

Then she joins Tom and his guys, and is accepted as though nothing like her trying to kill them had even happened. (Insert Twilight Zone theme music here.)

But Tom also has another love interest – his WIFE – (that he isn’t with because he doesn’t want her to be put in danger), but they take it so far, that she is actually married to another guy, (a useful idiot that’s gettin’ some of that but doesn’t know she’s really Tom Cruise’s character’s wife), even though Tom Cruise is her man. This had to be one of the goofiest and stupidest concepts that this movie dared venture into.

Hmmm… think were they possibly alluding to Tom’s reportedly eyes wide shut Hollywood lifestyle when they wrote that very odd situation in?

I am old enough to remember watching the original Mission: Impossible TV show as a kid. One of the things they did sometimes, was to make masks that would make them totally look like some other real person. In this movie, they seemed to use this tactic like a shell game.

It was like they wanted to keep the viewer guessing as to just whom, at any particular point, was actually the bad guy they had captured after stealing him from a police van that they knocked into the water. But was it really him or someone just wearing a mask of him?

Surprise! (For about the fifth time.)

They had to save the bad guy from drowning in the van in order to add some extra suspense to the movie - suspense which the film would have lacked for too long if it was not added in here.

Tom Cruise steals a helicopter in mid-air when he wasn’t even a passenger to begin with, though apparently he doesn’t know how to fly one. But he quickly gets the hang of it and becomes an expert copter pilot in seconds and chases down Henry Cavill in another copter, who has turned out to be a treasonous kind of guy.

After Tom makes both copters crash atop the highest cliff in the world, (which both men not only survive, but are in fighting shape), Tom tries to get the detonator for the nuclear bombs from Cavill so he can stop the bombs from exploding.

As you might expect, it is at the very last second that Tom Cruise’s character saves the planet, because if he saved it with something like five minutes left, it would be a big nothing-burger and the movie wouldn’t be at all interesting. (Add an extra eye-roll here.)

As I wrote earlier, if it wasn’t for the stunts, I think this movie would’ve bombed. Another bit of info from the same Wikipedia article attributed above, is that this movie was the very first to be in “REALD 3D, and also had an IMAX release.” I would guess that brought some extra box office cash into the equation, artificially elevating the film’s “popularity” to some degree.

I remember when the film came out, Tom Cruise took James Cordon up in a C-130 plane to do a skydive for a part of his late night show, and I was pretty impressed with Tom’s learning to do all this stuff and executing it so well.

In fact, I will readily give Tom Cruise tons of credit for the insane stuff he seemingly does in these stunts, as it takes a LOT of courage, will, and a little stupidity to do stuff like that, especially when you’re filthy rich and risking your life just to make a movie. But he does do it, (unless it’s all just a big lie), so my hat is off to him for really taking those extra, dangerous steps to exceed in his craft.

The only entertaining parts of this movie however, in my opinion, are the action scenes. The rest is just putridly awful drivel.

I give this film 2 Piles. 💩 💩

_{Mission: Impossible – Fallout – A Review © free-reign 2019}

Sources for images used in this post:

_{C-130 Aircraft: Image by SnottyBoggins from Pixabay
Claude Monet Painting: Image by David Mark from Pixabay
Nuke Explosion: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay}