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Mission: Impossible – Fallout review: spectacular and eye-popping, this is the blockbuster of the summer

Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Dir: Christopher McQuarrie. Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Vanessa Kirby, Michelle Monaghan, Wes Bentley. 12A cert, 147 mins

Tom Cruise will never play James Bond, but there’s a parallel universe in which he’s basically Felix Leiter, 007’s CIA buddy, and now six films deep into his own increasingly Bond-like franchise. Never yet known to decline one of his optional missions — a script gag there for the taking, though a possibly less thrilling night out — IMF agent Ethan Hunt is constitutionally unable to meet a tall vertical structure without flapping from it by his fingernails a reel or two later.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the first of these films to re-use a director, reneging on the initial plan of their producer and star to get a fresh auteur behind the camera each time. If we had to pick one name to return, it’s not likely anyone’s top choice would have been Christopher McQuarrie, whose fifth instalment, Rogue Nation, was the wooliest and least memorable to date — blurring, in my own head at least, with the dingy-basement intrigue and hoarse machismo of the Jack Reacher films.

What a turnout for the books, then, that McQuarrie has got it so right on his second try. Fallout doesn’t stint on the state-of-the-art set pieces that have long been a series staple, ever since Cruise dangled above that motion-sensitive vault floor with Brian De Palma holding the strings.

Beyond these highlights, which get more and more spectacular as the film goes on, it has tricks in its story you don’t see coming, and even the several scenes in, yep, dingy basements — McQuarrie is the most subterranean schemer in the business — pay off with nifty reversals that justify every beat of their seemingly drab exposition.

Take the killer opening, which feels awfully sombre and fun-free — nuclear attacks in holy cities?? — until you figure out the game Cruise and McQuarrie are playing. It’s not the last rug-pull tucked away in a pleasingly sinuous plot, about smallpox outbreaks, extremist splinter cells and bartered plutonium, which snakes its way from Belfast, via lengthy stops in Paris and London, to culminate with helicopter chases that dance with serene majesty above Kashmir’s Himalayas.

This finale has got to rank among the most eye-poppingly gorgeous action sequences ever shot: huge hat-tip to the generally amazing British cinematographer Rob Hardy (Annihilation) for saving such lavish visual treats for dessert.

Rogue Nation, perhaps, could be looked upon as just a dry run, a mere drawing board for all the feints and ruses developed this time, snagging Hunt and his dependable mainstays Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) in a spider-web of shifting affiliations. Not one of the agents played by Angela Bassett, Alec Baldwin or Rebecca Ferguson is consistently on their side.

Vanessa Kirby, Henry Cavill and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Fallout
Vanessa Kirby, Henry Cavill and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Fallout

A surviving villain, Sean Harris’s wild-eyed doomsayer Solomon Lane, becomes a negotiating tool whom the IMF brigade are forced into the ironic position of rescuing, during a sterling vehicular heist sequence along Paris’s riverbanks. This bit does everything in, to and around the Seine you can realistically imagine, short of drinking it dry or teleporting it to Pluto.

The score, by Lorne Balfe, is another asset, taking the famous three-note motif from that theme tune and stretching it out with plenty of muscular variation. Speaking of muscles, there’s Henry Cavill, too, who gets a kind of extended guest spot as a surly CIA assassin called Walker, looking so much like a Tom of Finland sketch, complete with porny moustache, that they can only be styling him that way on purpose.

Perhaps his role might have been better written — he does a lot of standing around looking shifty, as if waiting for a fluffer to show up — but the instant animus between him and Cruise tenses things up quite handily.

14 movie stunts that almost killed Tom Cruise
14 movie stunts that almost killed Tom Cruise

On the scrawnier end of the cast list, you get Pegg and Harris not only swapping faces — great workouts for that wonderfully naff gimmick this time — but also punching the living daylights out of each other. Finding space for lively nuggets of McQuarrie dialogue (“we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”), and even a sonic quotation from The Godfather, the stonking sound mix makes this almost as much fun to listen to as it is to watch.

And while not everything works out perfectly — through no fault of her own, Vanessa Kirby’s part as a glamorous underworld broker feels like a Bond-girl role too far, and Wes Bentley has a weirdly pointless walk-on as Michelle Monaghan’s new husband — it’s hard not to surrender to the sheer practical chutzpah of McQuarrie’s aims this time.

When Cruise is clambering around St Paul’s, over the top of Blackfriars Bridge and right the way to the summit of the Tate Modern, it’s oddly beautiful to watch London geography being so crisply respected, even while it’s being used as a giant and ludicrous plaything.

OK, McQuarrie may not have De Palma’s sweat-drop precision, John Woo’s craziness or the impish wit of Brad Bird, but his mastery of logistics here is easily sufficient to make it the blockbuster of the summer.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is released on July 25