This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

Mission: Impossible may be one of the few remaining legacy franchises still spitting out hits. As a child, I watched quite a bit of the Mission: Impossible television series (1966-1973); my dad was obsessed with sixties TV and often got episodes of various series on disc from Netflix (remember when that was a thing?). The show was one of my first introductions to the spy genre: long before I watched 007 seduce and assassinate, I watched Jim Phelps (Peter Graves), Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain), and Rollin Hand (Martin Landau) deceive and caper. Mission: Impossible was slick, cool, and thrilling.

I could write a whole article on the brilliance of Brian De Palma’s deconstruction of the show in the first Mission: Impossible film (1996) and a whole series of articles on how the film series has only gotten better from there, especially after Christopher McQuarrie took the helm with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation in 2015. But I’m here to talk about the film that rests at #11 on MovieJawn’s Action Movie Countdown: Mission: Impossible– Fallout (2018). In a series of standouts action films, Fallout in many ways represents the peak of the franchise, combining homage of the theatrics of the original show with contemporary action choreography.

Of course, the film franchise has now become synonymous with Tom Cruise in his most famous role as superspy Ethan Hunt, an IMF agent that a character would later describe in the next film as “a mind-reading, shapeshifting incarnation of chaos.” At the beginning of Fallout, Ethan is dealing with the trauma of–well, several movies worth of trauma–but especially the trauma inflicted by Solomon Lane, the deviously cunning antagonist of the previous film, Rogue Nation. As usual, this does not stop him from taking a mission to retrieve three plutonium cores from terror-for-hire organization The Apostles and their mysterious leader, Solomon Lane fanboy, John Lark. What should have been a straightforward mission does not go as planned, and Ethan and his team–Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson)–find themselves racing against Lark to find the plutonium and prevent a nuclear disaster.

McQuarrie was the first director to return for more than one film in the franchise, and he approached Fallout as a way of exploring some of the longer running themes of the series, especially Ethan’s interior emotions and motivations. Cruise, who really is now sort of a co-director/creator of the series, wanted the film to resolve Ethan’s relationship with Julia (Michelle Monaghan). McQuarrie’s script was initially only 33 pages long when filming began: he has since said in interviews that he believes that shorter scripts with a more broad outline for the movie with cast and writers filling in more of the details during filming works better for Mission: Impossible films because they allow space for the action to really shine. It’s difficult to argue with the result: Cruise, Rhames, and Pegg are talented actors, producers, and writers, respectively, and they understand these characters that they have embodied for almost two decades (almost three for Cruise and Rhames). The classic spy genre tension, the visual storytelling, the character creation through action choreography–Ferguson’s performance especially stands out in this regard–are all there despite the lack of detailed scripting.

One can almost view Fallout as a highly connected series of action setpieces: the failed plutonium exchange in Berlin, the fight at a charity rave in Paris, the chase through the Paris streets (including an amazing scene with Ethan trying to navigate the Arc De Triomphe traffic circle backward on a motorcycle), and the climactic chase and disarming sequence in Kashmir. The emphasis on these stunning locations and McQuarrie’s tendency to linger on these sequences allows the space for the action to shine. The infamous bathroom scene alone lasts almost four minutes in the film (and apparently took four weeks to shoot). Lorne Balfe’s rich score gives these tense setpieces wings, making every punch, kick, and shot feel more weighted as Ethan and Agent August Walker (Henry Cavill, who is magnificent in this film) shatter urinals and crash through walls in their fight with a decoy Lark (Chinese stuntman Liang Yan).

Cruise is, of course, always at the center of the action, especially during the stunts that he and the franchise have become so famous for. Despite being 56 at the time of filming, Cruise insisted as he always does on doing his own stunts, including performing over 106 jumps for the one-shot of the HALO jump over Paris and earning a pilot’s license and training for 18 months for the helicopter chase. Cruise’s commitment to making these scenes as riveting as possible pays off: I find myself holding my breath everytime I watch Ethan navigate the helicopter through the claustrophobic canyon in Kashmir, willing him to be ok even though I know he will be.

The action isn’t all tension, however; Fallout is actually an incredibly funny movie. It isn’t the oft-criticized “so that just happened” humor that plagues many superhero films (and is spilling over into mainstream action), but a quiet acknowledgement of the inherent absurdity of this being someone’s job. Things go wrong for Ethan sometimes, and those things can be really funny. In one scene, Benji guides Ethan through his earpiece as he chases Lark through London, accidentally telling Ethan to go the wrong way because Benji had the screen lock on his tablet and then guiding him up onto the rooftops because Benji forgot to put the map in 3D. Ethan runs through a funeral and an office building, apologizing both times for interrupting someone else’s day while trying to capture a terrorist and avoid being killed by henchmen. In another hilarious exchange, Ilsa asks Benji what Ethan is doing as Ethan runs towards the helicopters in Kashmir, prompting Benji to tell her “I find it best not to look,” a statement that might be the best summation of the experience of being Ethan Hunt’s teammate. 

Even Ethan’s run is comedic. Cruise manages to convey Ethan’s single-minded focus in the determined movements, arms stiffly moving up and down, too committed to the forward motion to ever slow down or look back. In some ways, Cruise is one of the remaining big name action stars left who is willing to look silly in the name of making a good movie (compare this to The Rock or Vin Diesel who have sacrificed making good films in the name of their own hypermasculine images and egos). And let’s not forget the viral GIF of Cavill shedding his jacket and performing a move that I can only describe as “cocking” his massive arms before engaging in the bathroom brawl. But this humor applies to the do-or-die ethos of the IMF as a whole: when Walker protests that “Hope is not a strategy,” Ilsa dryly observes, “He must be new.”

Because of the return of Lane as a villain (in addition to Lark), Rogue Nation and Fallout function as a duology. Fallout finds Ethan confronted with the limitations of his good intentions and the challenges of his dedication to his moral code. Unlike other superspies like Bond or Bourne, Ethan does not allow himself to descend into cynicism or ends-justify-the-means thinking. As IMF secretary Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) observes, Ethan cannot decide between the life of one person and the lives of the many. The trolley problem is to Ethan Hunt as the Kobayashi Maru is to James Kirk: unacceptable. This is partially from the trauma of losing his entire team in the first film, but it is also just part of Ethan Hunt’s core values. He refuses to let any member of his team (or even a random cop in Paris) die, even if it makes his mission more difficult or compromises national security. It’s an ongoing arc for Ethan, and it really feels like Fallout engages this arc in what ultimately feels like a satisfying conclusion (for now) to various storylines involving his ex-wife, his team, and his very notion of self. These emotional stakes give the action meaning and heft while also making us care about these characters who are performing death defying stunts on a seemingly daily basis.

Despite the catharsis of these various storylines in Fallout, it doesn’t feel like an inaccessible film to new fans. Everything that needs to be explained is, and the movie relies on fans of the franchise to remember the emotional stakes of previous films without requiring new viewers to learn a bunch of Mission: Impossible lore. The emotional moments hit harder if you’ve been paying attention (I also laughed a lot at Luther’s self-appointment role as team therapist), but it also works as a great stand-alone action piece if you aren’t that invested in these characters. Truly a modern action classic, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a stand-out in the franchise and in a genre that that franchise helped to create.