(director)
(studio)
(length)
26 July 2018 (released)
02 August 2018
It’s been three years since we last saw action man Ethan Hunt in, well, action. And despite Tom Cruise breaking his ankle mid-shoot last summer, halting production on the sixth Mission: Impossible instalment, Ethan (and Tom!) are back and better than ever.
Ethan is the kind of guy who really lives life on the edge, and this time around we get to see him tottering on the roof of a London skyscraper and dangling off a Kashmiri cliff edge among other places.
Opening in a Belfast hideaway, Hunt soon gets a mysterious knock at the door and, after exchanging a secret code and a hammy yet brilliant moment of Ethan declaring “I am the storm!”, our hero has once again accepted a new mission. Well of course he has – it would be a short movie otherwise.
He's tasked with locating some pesky plutonium that he accidentally let slip through the net on a previous mission before the baddies, this time known as the Apostles, use it to start a global nuclear attack.
Getting the band back together, Ethan’s trustee IMF sidekicks Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), along with help from IMF director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), get ready for another bonkers outing. However, Hunt’s days of doing things his own way are swiftly put to an end after CIA head Erica Sloan (Angela Bassett), who is no longer confident in his abilities, assigns moustachioed agent August Walker (Henry Cavill) to tag team the mission with him.
Together they must negotiate a deal with arms broker the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), while also dealing with returning baddie Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who Ethan already dealt with in 2015’s Rogue Nation, and his God complex notion that great suffering will bring about great peace.
With the added help of butt-kicking former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), the team race to save the world from a nuclear meltdown.
Whether you’re a fan of Cruise or not, there is no denying the 56-year-old is at his absolute best playing Ethan Hunt. Since first appearing as him in the 1996 original, the stunts have swiftly become bigger, bolder and better. The helicopter scene in writer/director Christopher McQuarrie’s latest Mission: Impossible is simply stunning. And when you bear in mind that Cruise does it all himself, your mind really will be blown.
The humour has been toned down slightly from the fifth film, though there are still plenty of laughs to be had, but with a more focused story this time around.
It’s hard to imagine what Cruise and his crew will do next, and Fallout will take a lot of beating, but just like Ethan Hunt, whose unofficial motto seems to be “I’ll figure it out”, we’re in no doubt they’re up for the challenge.
This is a summer blockbuster not to be missed on the big screen.
