Jeremy’s Tophunder №64: Mission: Impossible — Fallout

7 min readMay 31, 2020

If you’re wondering how far down the list I have to go before I find something about this movie worth complaining about, the first thing that comes to mind for me is that the colon in the middle of “Mission” and “Impossible” should probably disappear because it makes the naming style of the series rather awkward. Like, for the first one, it made sense. It’s a mission, and the mission is impossible. But for every movie after that, it got weird. Is the mission from the second movie “Impossible 2”? Let’s just get rid of the colon and just call everything “Mission Impossible: [Subtitle Here]” instead of being all weird about it. To that end, I’m going to be using that naming style for the remainder of this post. If you don’t like it, send your complaints to Skydance Media and Paramount Pictures, not me.

Mission Impossible: Fallout (see, isn’t that so much better?) is about as close as a movie on my list comes to being the film equivalent of a book written in caps lock. It’s two and a half hours of pulse-pounding action and tension, and there are, quite literally, no boring scenes. There are plenty of action movies that have lulls, like the scene in Fast Five where Dom and Brian drink beers on the porch and Brian asks Dom about his dad. Like — huge “who cares?” for me there. Or in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, when nothing really happens for the first hour and a half of the movie. Fallout doesn’t have those slow parts. Sure, there are scenes that are specifically designed to be a reprieve from all of the rising action, but those scenes are still high-tension (because the bad guys are in the wind), and they’re important. One in particular that I’m thinking of now provides some of the explanation for why Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his wife aren’t together anymore, only to run directly into a scene where his wife appears unexpectedly.

The Mission Impossible series has done something that not a lot of series have ever been able to do — the last four movies in the series have all somehow been better than the one before it. Other than a (relative) dud with Mission Impossible 2, every movie in the series was the high point of the group to date. Mission Impossible 3 was the first indication of the potential the series had, introducing Julia (Ethan’s wife, played by Michelle Monaghan) and Benji (Simon Pegg’s character), and taking the villains to a new level with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Billy Crudup. Ghost Protocol introduced Jeremy Renner’s character, who stuck around for two movies, and Rogue Nation brought back Ving Rhames and brought in Alec Baldwin and Rebecca Ferguson.

I thought Ghost Protocol gave Tom Cruise the best teammates of any movie in the series to that point, with Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton certainly making the movie feel bigger. I felt that way until I saw Rogue Nation, when Rebecca Ferguson put Paula Patton’s performance in Ghost Protocol to shame. It wasn’t until I saw Ferguson that I realized that Patton didn’t actually know what she was doing in the action sequences. Re-watching it now, they clearly used a lot of creative editing to make it look like Paula Patton knew how to fight. Over the last two movies, they haven’t needed to do that with Ferguson’s character. I had never heard of Ferguson prior to Rogue Nation, but I thought she’s been great in each of the last two movies.

And that brings us around to Henry Cavill.

The US Agent who starts the movie working with Ethan Hunt but then turns out to be a rogue double agent/spy somewhere in Act 2 is a trope that the series has used before. What they haven’t done before is have the actor be so physically imposing, especially compared to Cruise. Most actors in Hollywood aren’t quite as tall as you think they are, and Cruise is no exception. He’s listed as 5'7", and even that might be generous. Most of the time, they pair him with other actors that are of similar height — Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner are both under 5'10". Cavill, on the other hand, is at least 6'1", a full six inches taller than Cruise. That matters here — when Cavill stands next to Cruise, he looks like he’s the size of a Range Rover.

Most of the time, the bad guys in the series are on the older side, just as smart and cunning as Cruise is, but ultimately not that scary if and when it comes time for them to throw down and have a fist-fight. Guys like the aforementioned Philip Seymour Hoffman from Mission Impossible 3, Michael Nyqvist from Ghost Protocol, or Sean Harris from the last two movies. Cavill gave the bad guy an element that they just haven’t really had before, and I thought that took the movie to a new level. It’s perhaps the most evident during the fight scene in the bathroom with who Hunt (at the time) thinks is John Lark, before Cavill’s character turns heel.

Fallout doesn’t have the coolest action sequence in the series, that title probably still goes to the scene at the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol. But Fallout still has some incredible stuff, like HALO jumping into a lightning storm, or the helicopter chase scene. Those two are among the best stunts ever done in a series that really seems to pride itself on going bigger and more spectacular with each installment. The fight sequences are great, and the chase scene around Paris is also one of the high points in the series. Like I mentioned up top, there really aren’t any lulls in the movie. Every scene is bringing some kind of excitement or tension.

The Mission Impossible series, in reality, is everything that the Fast & The Furious franchise wishes it could be. For all intents and purposes, they’re just as comically ridiculous. The only real differences are that the Mission Impossible series has more talented actors, and they very, very vaguely try to ground their story in some sense of reality. I know people who can’t stand the Fast & Furious movies. I strongly disagree with them, and I think they’re pretentious snobs for thinking so, but I understand. I get it. They aren’t for everyone. I have a much harder time accepting that point of view when it comes to Mission Impossible. I don’t just think that the Mission Impossible series makes for entertaining movies, I think they make for just plain-and-simple good movies. The last three movies in the series all scored higher than 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with Fallout topping out at 97 percent.

I feel like I have pretty good taste in movies, and I know that I have a lot of movies on my list that are critical darlings with high scores on review aggregation websites. But if you trust Rotten Tomatoes (which I assume you have to, it’s the gold standard), then Mission Impossible: Fallout is tied for the 5th-highest rated movie on my Tophunder. You probably want to think that it’s just a mindless action spy movie — I kind of want it to be that way. But it isn’t. It’s a great movie on its own merit.

If there’s anything about the movie that I could criticize, I’d say that Henry Cavill turning out to be a bad guy was telegraphed a little too much (if they meant for that to be a surprise, they didn’t quite pull it off), and that it’s just barely noticeable that he’s a British guy doing an American accent. I don’t think his accent is bad. It’s not like his British accent slips out. He just sounds like a British guy doing an American accent. I’m not quite sure how else to describe it, but I notice it every time.

Those are two very minor complaints, though. It’s a genuinely great movie from a genuinely great series. At certain points, I considered five different Mission Impossible movies for inclusion on the list (all except MI:2), and one draft of the list had all five of them. In the end, I decided that the movies kind of run together and all have similar feels (especially the last three), and trying to distinguish between them didn’t seem totally fair. Fallout is clearly the cream of the crop, so given that I knew I was going to include one, it had to be the one that stands out from the rest.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring