Review of Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) by Wayne K — 14 Oct 2018

I've never been the biggest fan of the Mission Impossible Series, largely because a film franchise having with the world 'impossible' in the title surly negates the reason for having more than one instalment.

The few that I've seen I enjoyed a lot less than I was hoping, and the last one actively irritated me. But this one attracted such acclaim that I couldn't help but be curious about it. As a pure action film, it's one of the finest I've seen this year.

Writer/Director Christopher McQuarrie clearly understands that, for action to be exciting, it must first be comprehensible. The chase sequences are beautifully shot and assembled, and I could often feel my fists tightening when the heroes we're close to danger, they're that tense.

It does frequently suffer from Fast & Furious Syndrome, the term I've devised to describe characters who are so immune from damage and death that's there's never any reason to worry about them, and the films plot is a bad combination of old hat and swerve-obsessed.

Admittedly some of the twists are pretty funny, but the film is constantly trying to make it seem like everyone is a bad guy at some point and it quickly becomes tiresome. But aside from that, and its assortment of often frustratingly ambiguous spy movie dialogue, it's a tonne of fun, and more than worth watching for the action sequences alone.