Review | Mission: Impossible – Fallout film review: Tom Cruise back in best outing yet of the espionage action series
The sixth in the Mission Impossible series, Fallout is full of outrageous stunts, exotic locales, an engrossing plot and nerve-shredding tension, while Tom Cruise’s continuing quest for realism proves utterly mesmerising
4.5/5 stars
Twenty-two years since Tom Cruise first played super spy Ethan Hunt, the actor is back for a sixth outing which could well be the best of the series.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout is full of outrageous stunts, exotic locales, an engrossing plot and nerve-shredding tension, with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie serving up an old-fashioned action movie that draws from earlier episodes and, somehow, puts a new spin on familiar tropes.
Searching for three missing plutonium spheres, Hunt is joined by his IMF teammates Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), as well as a CIA brute, August Walker (Henry Cavill), who is there to oversee the mission. Also in the frame is a British broker named The White Widow (The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby) and terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), Hunt’s nemesis from the previous instalment Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation .
There’s even time for familiar female faces – fellow spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and Hunt’s lost love Julia (Michelle Monaghan) – to reappear in a story that carefully balances global peril with personal high stakes.
The first director to return for a second Mission movie, McQuarrie moves the story along from the streets of Paris to the rooftops of London to the mountains of Kashmir with ruthless efficiency. It’s a blueprint for high-adrenaline cinema.
