Patreon Letter: 26th November 2018 (Patreon)

It's me, it's Jackson, here with another patreon letter! Hope you're all doing well. I'm stressed, tired and pretty down today, but that's not exactly unusual. We're all depressed online, you know how it is, just gotta do our best and stay functional as much as we can. Which I will do for you today by writing about a film.

Mission Impossible: Fallout is the sixth Mission Impossible movie, a series I've always liked a lot and unfortunately wasn't able to catch this one in cinemas like I have every one since three. But while I didn't catch it, everyone else on the internet did, and this ended up being kinda the Fast Five of Mission Impossible, this big moment where my entire timeline was united in praise for how excellent this series they hadn't thought about in a while was. Obviously the comparison isn't perfect being that every MI movie save two has done well critically and most have made a bunch of money, but the point stands is this still felt like a shift in terms of how overwhelmingly enthusiastically this film was received. My timeline was full of hyperbolic statements about how this is the next fury road, a true action masterpiece, etc etc.

And I was always confused because like I say: I've always enjoyed these movies. They're films in which Tom Cruise goes and does ridiculous stunts with the barest shreds of plot around the edges, each one has been given to a different, distinct director. Every Mission Impossible movie has a completely different sense of voice, style and tone linked only by the basic premise of Tom Cruise Doing Wild Shit (and also, for some reason Simon Pegg is there). Fallout, however, is the first movie that ditches this and brings back Christopher McQuarrie to do a direct sequel to Rogue Nation. Which is why I was much less excited for this entry because he's made one, let someone else have a go. But I'd heard such overwhelming praise that I wanted to make sure I saw it and here is my take: it's alright.

It is probably the second worst Mission Impossible movie, but that isn't as bad as it initially sounds because MI:3 is fucking atrocious and the rest are well into the realm of "a good time." If you are looking for that fabled good time, Fallout will handily provide you with one. Unfortunately it ended up being somewhat of a departure in terms of why I like the series, and not just because of revolving director's chair staying still.

See the thing about MI is that it is nominally a series about spies. The first film, until Cruise jumps onto a helicopter, is just an excellent spy movie. Kittridge truly has never seen him very upset. After the first movie the series became all action all the time, but cased within the plot of a spy movie because that's the formula. A guy will rip off a mask and reveal himself to be another guy and you will feel proud because you totally called that he was wearing a mask. Fallout has the goods here. 

However what Fallout adds is a layer of self-mythologizing meta narrative that I suppose is inevitable six films in but ends up really dragging down the parts of the movie that aren't things blowing up. The film builds Ethan Hunt (and by extension, Cruise) into an omnipotent super being, without whom the world would have been destroyed a thousand times over. The film expects you to care about the weight of this burden, as Hunt is constantly forced into moral quandaries where he has to decide whether to uphold the mission by sacrificing someone for the greater good, and obviously he never has to and always finds a third way because he is an invincible superhuman who can do no wrong.

Which is fine. We know Hunt is an invincible superhuman who can do no wrong, Cruise has full control over everything in these movies. But if that's the case, it's not the best idea to bring to the surface the burden of Hunt's morality when there's no stakes to it whatsoever. He even gets to reunite with his wife, the avatar of his sacrifice (he could never stay married... oh the world needs him so), but obviously they still love each other and have emotional reunions where they both understand this was the Right Thing to do. And to be clear, I'm not saying they need to make a movie about post-marital resentment, I'm saying they had a good thing going before with the straight-faced spy movie plots and this ends up muddying the waters in ways that drag the movie down.

And then we get to the action scenes themselves, which are okay. The stuntwork is good, Tom Cruise jumps out of a plane, everyone gets what they need. The main problem is this film exists in the shadow of Brad Bird's Ghost Protocol, which had this effortlessly playful sense of how an action scene is essentially a series of gags stacked atop each other, and McQuarrie's films just can't compete. Tom Cruise doing a single take HALO jump is cool, but it's not as cool as Tom Cruise slowly shuffling a massive projection of an empty hallway down a Kremlin corridor to hide the fact he's walking behind it. Death defying stuntwork is fine, but it's not everything. The most terrifying thing in the entire series is a bead of sweat, y'know?

Anyway that's enough of me moaning and being disappointed, this movie was fine! It's not Infinity War, it's very watchable, I'm only so negative because y'know you can find all the positive points in the consensus so there's no real need going over them. 

Oh, one more thing: the Cool Team in this movie is Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Alec Baldwin. Simon Pegg is the youngest member of the team of elite secret agents that will save the world. The IMF is a cartoon. This is the good kind of stupid. More of this please.

-Jackson