The Burden of Continuity
Any long-running series in any medium sooner or later faces the burden of continuity. Stories bring in love interests and deaths and backstory, and it adds up. Creators have to balance the needs of new audiences against longtime fans. Even a simple action-blockbuster franchise like Mission: Impossible has to deal with the weight of its own past by the time its sixth installment rolls around.
That sixth installment is 2018’s Mission: Impossible—Fallout, in which again we follow Tom Cruise as dashing American spy Ethan Hunt. It’s the first movie in the series to bring back a director from a previous film—Christopher McQuarrie, also scriptwriter, as he was on the fifth movie, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation.
Fallout tries to pay off an implicit conflict in Hunt’s romantic history that’s developed over the course of several films. This is oddly endearing, and gives the franchise a bit of identity; James Bond may move from woman to woman in each film, or in the course of a single film, but Hunt’s got a wife and that shapes the development of his relationship with mysterious spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).
Still, Hollywood only has so many story-shapes for the romantic interests of a male action hero. McQuarrie doesn’t try to break new ground, but does show a deftness of touch in how he seasons inventive action-movie beats with familiar romantic-triangle tropes.
The story opens with Hunt and his team (Ving Rhames as computer guy Luther Stickell and Simon Pegg as tech guy and field agent Benji Dunn) failing to recover three plutonium cores from mysterious master villain John Lark. Lark’s gathered the remnants of the bad-guy group from the last movie, and is setting out to create chaos. Hunt and his agents are forced to team up with hotheaded CIA agent August Walker (Henry Cavill) to get the plutonium back. But Ilsa Faust is also involved, and Hunt’s not sure what she's after or why.
That sets up a series of well-paced set-pieces and betrayals that lasts just shy of two and a half hours. Which is probably too long, but the movie is filled with incidents. After one of the best-choreographed hand-to-hand fights in the entire series, Hunt gains the trust of a shady arms dealer and finds himself involved in a plot to rescue the bad guy of the last movie, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). That turns into an extended set of car chases, gunfights, and fistfights throughout Paris.
The requisite scene of the scheming bad-guy prisoner messing with the minds of the heroes leads to a set of betrayals which itself gives way to another extended action scene through London. And that sets up a protracted climax in the mountains of Kashmir, involving nuclear bombs to be defused, a helicopter chase, and the potential death of Ethan’s wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan).
If the opening scenes lack room to breathe, the pacing becomes more sure-footed as the film moves along. Fallout lives in its set-pieces. McQuarrie’s said that he’s learned the best approach to these movies is to find a location, develop action scenes based on the places he has to shoot in, and then cobble together a coherent narrative out of those scenes.
It sounds like a strange way to build a story, but based on this and his previous movie (and the ones to follow), it’s on the whole effective. That may not be surprising; the point of the Mission: Impossible movies, what gets audiences into theaters, is the set-pieces. Start with those, and make sure they work, and you’re halfway home.
The trick, I suspect, is being able to parse out motivation as you assemble the action beats. McQuarrie has a good grasp at any given moment of what each character is doing and why they’re doing it. He also knows how to dole out that information to the audience, so that we’re surprised and engaged by twists in the tale.
The problem is that he’s struggling against the weight of the past. The movie might’ve been simpler, tighter and shorter if he didn’t have to cope with elements from previous installments. It might’ve felt less repetitive; a subplot about political tensions with Hunt’s higher-ups rehashes material from the last three movies without adding anything new.
Mostly, though, the movie’s slowed by the superfluity of villains. We get two master schemers, and that’s one master schemer too many. Also, the commercial need to keep their ideology unconnected to any real-world political sensibility means they’re both left underdeveloped.
And neither have any particular relevance to Hunt personally, even though McQuarrie at least tries to keep character front and center. That character focus doesn’t always work; an awful voice-over at the end describes Hunt’s morality in hagiographic terms that has minimal relevance to the spy we’ve seen at work through this and previous movies. But McQuarrie understands that, at however basic a level, character is what pulls you into the splashy action scenes. The lack of character engagement between hero and villain is therefore a real problem.
Fallout’s not going to be mistaken for a character-based movie, and it doesn’t reinvent action cinema. It’s a well-machined film that lasts too long, with a central hero-villain conflict that has no real chemistry to it. It’s engaging at any given moment, even if it struggles with the weight of the franchise’s own past. Not a great movie, but it knows how to entertain.