Mission: Impossible – Fallout Set A New Standard For Action Filmmaking

Some setpieces can go well beyond the simplicity of watching a man jump out of a plane, as powerful as the knowledge is that we’re really watching that enormously famous man jump out of that plane. The ensuing fight in Paris is a perfect example of how McQuarrie-the-writer enables McQuarrie-the-director. The objective is simple: locate the man who is purportedly John Lark, capture him, and make a mask of his face so that Ethan can embody him and meet the so-called White Widow Alana in disguise. Ethan and Walker locate the man (Liang Yang) in a bathroom at a Parisian rave; one step out of three completed. Of course, the complications mount, as Ethan’s interrupted in trying to tranquilize the man, who’s able to fight back before Walker knocks him out … with the now-broken mask-making machine. The supposed Lark wakes up after Ethan and Walker fail to secretly make a mask of his face with the malfunctioning computer, and they proceed to have a wild, no-holds-barred fistfight. (Here, we get the ridiculously delightful image of Henry Cavill essentially reloading his muscles mid-brawl.) It’s only thanks to the surprising return of Ilsa that Ethan survives, but in doing so, the final complication arises: the supposed Lark is shot dead in the face, so our hero has to act as Lark in the hopes that the White Widow’s never seen his face.
So the next lengthy complication is really twofold: Ethan has to hope that she won’t know he’s not Lark, and if she buys into it, he has to play-act without a mask as a man so cold-bloodedly evil that he’s unleashed a smallpox outbreak on helpless women and children. Though Tom Cruise hasn’t gone beyond playing straightforward heroes of late, long removed from the days of working with directors like Stanley Kubrick and Michael Mann, he still has the propensity to communicate coldness and cruelty behind his intense gaze. So when he tells Alana, “I’m as ugly as they come,” you believe it all the more even as every audience member knows the opposite is true. When Ethan — who learns that to get the plutonium cores, he’ll have to lead an extraction the next day in Paris of none other than the heavily guarded prisoner Solomon Lane — visualizes the scheme to do so and realizes it climaxes with him killing anyone in his path including police officers, he darkly brushes it off when Alana’s doubtful brother imagines he’d draw the line somewhere. “I have no line,” Ethan intones. And again, you believe it, not just because Ethan can fool anyone, but because Cruise can do it too. Walker uses the former knowledge to his advantage, as we become privy to something Ethan doesn’t know yet: August Walker is John Lark, a fact that becomes clear when Walker tells Sloane that he believes Ethan is the real John Lark and hands over the dead Lark decoy’s phone … except it’s a dummy phone, not the real (broken) one. Much of what he says to Sloane at least lines up with our knowledge of Ethan Hunt over the course of six movies: “How many times has Hunt’s government betrayed him, disavowed him, cast him aside?” Walker is, of course, really speaking about himself, but so much of it lines up with Ethan that we can only appreciate his superheroism (but not that kind) all the more.
The real extraction of Lane, like the great setpieces that litter this franchise, is full of complications, including one that Ethan banks upon because he creates it. We know Ethan Hunt would not kill cops (or anyone he doesn’t have to), so instead of the intended plan, he jumps ahead of schedule to not only break Lane out with the assistance of Benji and Luther, but to evade the White Widow’s men. To do that, he has to run afoul of the Parisian police as well as the motorcycle-driving Ilsa, the latter of whom needs to kill Lane to re-prove her loyalty to MI6 and the British Crown. The setpiece is really two separate action scenes; in the first, Ethan has to move from truck to his own motorcycle to race through Paris (including driving backwards around the Arc de Triomphe years before John Wick ever would), and in the second, Ethan has to outrun Ilsa through those same streets. As ever, the thrill of these chases is that they’re cleanly and effectively filmed, and that it really does look like Tom Cruise doing all of these things. It’s simultaneously terrifying and masterful to behold.