Despite their predictable nature and pretty stock-standard story-lines, I have to admit that the Mission Impossible movies always kind of appealed to me. This was especially true with MI2 where Philip Seymour Hoffman became my favorite villain of all time briefly. Following that, and especially with the addition of Simon Pegg and his dumb comedic interludes that I don't think did the franchise any favors, I lost interest in the MI movies altogether.
The other day, in lieu of anything better to do, I decided to give the latest MI movie a go anyway and I liked it a lot more than I thought i was going to and feel as though they started to return to their semi-dark roots, which is a good thing.
The film starts out in the usual fashion, with Ethan Hunt receiving directions in the "if you choose to accept it" type way in some secluded location. He then gathers his team to go after some horribly nefarious characters who are dead set on global destruction (again.)
I suppose the story isn't really important because that isn't what makes these films good; we all know that the Hunt and the MI crew are going to emerge victorious and it is just a question of how.
What potentially make the MI films entertaining is the tension and the crazy situations that Ethan finds himself in and the brilliant manner in which they film it to make it look so real. Tom does actually do a lot of his own stunts and part of the fun is trying to figure out which ones he did himself and which ones are a body double. Seriously, it is hard to tell and this is true even for the high speed motorcycle chases.
Simon Pegg and presumably the writers kept his dumb comedic interludes at a minimum and Ving Rhames and his ever-increasing-in-size head didn't get involved in much of the action either - which is good in my mind (sorry Ving).
I did enjoy the addition of CIA agent, August Walker (Henry Cavill) to the crew and his participation in some of the fight scenes was really top drawer. What's funny about his inclusion in the film is that even though he is only 6 foot 1, he makes Tom look short (because Cruise IS short) the few times that they appear side by side. I can't say for certain but I believe that Tom will normally not be in scenes with people much taller than he is unless they use creative camera angles to conceal the fact that he is only 5 foot 8. I think 5 foot 8 is probably really close to average male height anyway, but certainly not the height of a person that a viewer would consider an intimidating action star.
This is why all of the members of his team are chosen this way in all the MI movies, very rarely are they, or any of the baddies, over 6 feet tall: Case in point is Ving Rhames, who despite being wide and muscular, is only 5 foot 11.
One of the wildest action sequences happens at the very beginning in a situation where the team needs to skydive from a height where oxygen is necessary. This is NOT CGI, and cruise and a film crew jumped from a military airplane 106 times over the course of a year in order to get the footage necessary. I think this might be part of the reason why the budget was nearly $200 million.
From the official Paramount channel
The film nearly pulled in $800 million at the global box office and I think this can pretty much assure that there will be a 7th film. Their return to a less whimsical story and some pretty dark overtones is a welcome on in my mind, because when Pegg (who i still do not like in the cast) was added, I thought that the entire Mission Impossible series of films was on it's way out.
Fallout might be the best one out of all of them in terms of action and is definitely worth watching. I would say that it is one of the best action films of the past couple of years.
