One thing you can expect in a Mission: Impossible movie is a yawning wide shot of some exotic cityscape, populated by a sole, tiny figure: producer-star Tom Cruise, whose construction of this monster franchise around himself is a corollary to the image itself. Cruise could never top the previous M:I installment, Rogue Nation (2015), in which he hangs off the side of an airplane (for real) at 5,000 feet, but writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, returning from the last film, honors the series’ perfect formula of a user-friendly plot (anarchists have acquired plutonium; they must be stopped) and epic action sequences. Ironically, the most entertaining element of all may be the star’s advancing age; Cruise, well into his 50s, scores numerous laughs as the increasingly confused and harried CIA agent Ethan Hunt, leaping into one spectacular stunt after another and then wishing he hadn’t. With Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson.
Mission: Impossible — Fallout
PG-13 • 2 hours 27 min • 2018
