The way to determine a great action film is the quality of its bathroom fight scene. "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" has a pretty good one, which makes it a pretty good action movie. Sure, there are countless other action scenes in this latest in the long running franchise, but few on this intimate of scale (most involve breakneck car chases, or freaking helicopters crashing into snowy mountain tops). It's the perfect summarization of the aging hero's latest entry, "pretty good" (feel free to toss a "darn" in the middle there).
Viewed against July's other big movie "Skyscraper," which I gave two and a half stars to, "Mission Impossible 6" is significantly better entertainment; you get far more bang (and I mean "bang") for your buck here than the half star difference between the two implies.
"Mission: Impossible - Fallout" is a perfect "Tom Cruise movie," at least when he's focused on punching bad guys from one location to another. From a plot stand of view, a perfunctory one, involving Cruise having to chase down stolen plutonium from madman Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who wants to blow stuff up. Sure, there's little details here and there, with old friends lending a helping hand, a forgotten love suddenly appearing just in time to be in danger (and even a traitor or two(?)), but don't go into the megaplex expecting Shakespeare. Or anything new. Or anything you haven't seen Tom Cruise do. The dialogue is all stuff that sounds good in trailers (which explains why the trailers have so few exchanges of words), but it sets up the action just fine.
Tom's character, Ethan Hunt, is seemingly indestructible despite almost wearingly scraping himself off the floor each time he's put back down. Whenever he sees an impossible jump he never hesitates, and we the audience know he's going to make that leap, but the film almost doesn't let him. Instead of clearing the jump flawlessly, he bounces off the wall yet just barely hangs on- it's a refreshing change from most action movies, it's almost like it's his first action movie, even though most people in the crowded theater probably came here because of fond memories of the first five flicks.
It all adds up to your usual action movie cocktail, only executed quite well, playing out like an old James Bond film trimmed of its plot (as well as careless sex and chain smoking). The supporting cast really help sell things here, an eclectic, almost baffingly mixture of character actors all playing characters in a movie by doing and saying things we've all seen and done in other movies, and never in real life. But they're all so good at playing that person that it works on a level beyond dialogue; ignoring what someone was saying and just listening to how they were talking, their tone, facial expressions, you'd get the picture.
Let's try. Imagine Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) walks in a damp basement to talk to Ethan. By observing the scene and not the discourse, I thought:
"Oh, he's got bad new- OK cool, new set pieces, what's gonna blow up now?"
Well, he brought bad news and things did explode, but not before a shootout! Now that's what I call an effective genre film!
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