What gets me into watching the Mission Impossible movies is that Tom Cruise does most of his own stunts. I get a sick masochistic thrill watching Cruise get pummeled, kicked and thrown around a lot.
In Mission: Impossible — Fallout he gets pummeled endlessly and it is seen in excruciating realistic detail. I felt sorry for Tom and winced when he flies head first over both the handlebars of a motorcycle and the hood of a car skidding face first just inches from the screen. Other moments of misery are the infamous parkour leap that injured Cruise’s ankle and shutdown production for weeks, and an in cabin helicopter avalanche and resulting loops the loops. The man knows how to suffer for his art and performance.
As an added bonus Tom gets to fight the current Superman, Henry Cavil in a six day old beard that had to be CGI-ed out when the concurrently filming Justice League movie went into a few weeks of reshoots. Cavil plays a CIA agent with ever shifting loyalties to the dark side, and for this betrayal the director Christopher McGuarrie makes Cavil endure the same do your own stunts pain.
If this seems like the best of the six Mission: Impossible films that’s because Fallout is always cleverly recycling plot elements, characters and action moments to disguise the fact that this is basically a greatest hits movie. Nothing succeeds in Hollywood like a good reset.
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