Mission: Impossible
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Fallout dispatches Hunt, the show pony of the globetrotting Impossible Mission Force, on a race against time to recover a stolen batch of plutonium. Ving Rhames returns as the team’s sturdy taskmaster Luther, and Simon Pegg as the voice of reason Benji, essentially a cardboard cutout wearing a sign that says “comedy sidekick”.
Others in the support staff include Sean Harris as an intellectual villain railing from captivity, Angela Bassett as a CIA chief making asides about waterboarding, Rebecca Ferguson and Michelle Monaghan striving to give credibility to the concept of Hunt as a lover, and Vanessa Kirby as a not very fatale femme fatale whose duplicity is played mostly for laughs.
As a new team member with an advanced diploma in thuggery, Henry Cavill stands around giving Cruise amused, almost flirtatious glances, wearing an absurd moustache seemingly assigned to prevent anyone judging him the better-looking of the two.
Disappointingly, Fallout breaks the Mission: Impossible tradition of having a different director tackle each instalment. But it’s no mystery why McQuarrie is back, since his approach plays to Cruise’s strengths: his idea of a good action sequence involves abrupt shifts of rhythm and constructing chains of events that aim for maximum unlikelihood without actually breaking the laws of physics.
The best of these has Hunt racing over the rooftops of London, fearlessly following the instructions he receives from Luther, who plots the course from afar while failing to realise his operative is not positioned at ground level. It’s a scenario that Cruise’s pal Ben Stiller could have exploited for slapstick, with results that would be different but not entirely: Hunt resembles not only an avatar in a video game, but an actor willing to accept without question any direction he is given.
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