If you can set aside all of the troubling connections, willful acts of ignorance, and the tremendous level of violence and abuse that occur in the name of keeping the star of this film happy, then Mission Impossible: Fallout is a freakin’ blast. Hannah Gadspy is going to have the last word on this one, and when the day of reckoning comes, I’ll be at the bonfire with the rest of them burning my DVDs of Top Gun, but until that day I’m gonna hop on the critical bandwagon five days late to confirm what everyone else has already said much more elegantly and usually without those qualifiers.
When the first Mission Impossible (reboot?) staring Tom came around, I was a young, impressionable school child. My parents, who are Tom’s contemporaries, grew up with him in the same way that I’m growing up with Elizabeth Debicki, JLaw, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson. So naturally, we fell in love with Ethan Hunt together, my parents presumably loving Tom’s unique ability to put himself out there physically and emotionally, us loving the fact that he could avoid all the lasers when he was hanging from the ceiling and the way he tricked people with masks that didn’t make any g-damn sense.
Watching MIF this weekend reminded me that one of the things that made Ethan Hunt so lovable in the original was the way that he couldn’t keep his expression straight when he was running fast or suddenly tasked with avoiding a large metal object. He pulled some clownish mugs at a time when his competitors on screen (Bruce Willis, Pierce Brosnan, Antonio Banderas) were cool cumbers walking away from that explosion. The pained look of muted horror mixed with the uncomfortable onset of sudden fear-diarrhea stole our hearts. Even now, the urge to look away from explosions, stoic and alpha is kind of par for the course–just look at Dwayne “The Local Boy Who Made It” Johnson, Denzel Washington, Vin Diesel, and Chris Pratt. It makes Tom’s decision to stick it out with his uncool faces today in 2018 all the more brave, a signal that we too are in on the joke, we don’t need to roll our eyes, because they get it, we get it, it’s all ridiculous, and we don’t need you to take us seriously. That level of self-awareness is still lacking in a lot of big action franchises.
Fallout features a lot of callbacks to the original franchise’s charming, screwball humor. It has the detonation and the car chases and party scene with an alluring woman, but it also does interesting things on familiar ground like letting the woman slash a guy attacking her in the face or letting the damsel escape from her own imprisonment. In that vein, critics have written about the way in which Fallout has learned from the mistakes of its past and changed to fit the times, especially in its depiction of female characters.
The circularity to the consequences of decisions sets Fallout apart from its predecessors and retroactively gives what seemed like flights of fancy in previous films more dramatic weight. Tom can’t brawl like he used to. The cloak-and-dagger incipient action of Fallout relies on what previously appeared to be small private instances of heroism in other films. It gives Fallout a sense of gravity and thoughtfulness and elliptic memory (what is the tagline for the new Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film? “The Past Never Forgets?”), even as it rolls its eyes and places its tongue firmly in cheek.
The opening scene is Ethan Hunt receiving a package hidden in a copy of The Odyssey and it’s a nice marker for the way that the team is able to accomplish their ends through deceit rather than show of force, anathema to most other action films (like the otherwise amazing Guy Richie King Arthur movie from last year) , where the only real difference between being a good guy or bad guy is that good guys want it more. The use of contrafactual scenes that mess with our expectations and let the movie play with iteration is one of the most novel gimmicks of MIF.
This movie is as good as Tom is bad, maybe more, which I think is saying something.
