Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff
Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Release Date: July 10, 2023
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the IMF team must track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens humanity if it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the world’s fate at stake, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan must consider that nothing can matter more than the mission – not even the lives of those he cares about.
Straight in, I will say this is the best instalment in the Mission Impossible series; there, I said it. It has everything, including dramatic scenes with lots of humour and action sequences that excite me even more about writing it. From the opening scene, the film aggressively steers towards the non-stop mouth wide open in awe route. The film is so clever in getting the viewer so invested in the plot, and at times my eyes were so fixed on the screen that I couldn’t take them off it. In particular, early in the movie, the crew are at an airport in Abu Dhabi, filled with suspense and little storyline twists between characters that sets up and give us a flavour of what is yet to come. The film dominates the audience’s attention continuously with different emotions throughout specific moments, and they are so interchangeable. There is a scene where an incident happens on a bridge in Venice, and Ethan (Cruise) is sprinting towards it, and immediately, It sets in that panic and makes you want to shout at the screen, ‘Hurry Up, Tom’. In contrast, there is a part where a yellow Fiat 500 car is introduced to us on the streets of Rome, which is hilarious and gripping simultaneously. So that rollercoaster of audience reaction and response is always present throughout and thankfully never seems to come to a halt.
Action sequences are persistent and are paced to perfection in terms of a timeline attached to the fast ongoing plot, especially Tom Cruise’s death-defying motorbike stunt, which the 61-year-old thrill seeker did himself. Everyone in the cast brings their uniqueness and complements and accommodates each other’s performance well, adding more quality to Cruise’s calibre. Now on to the nitpicking; there is a character called Paris (Pom Klementieff), a French assassin tasked with hunting Ethan (Cruise) and Grace (Hayley Atwell); she plays the villain role very well and is an excellent addition to the cast. There is a scene in Venice where she is wearing face paint that resembles the famous Venice carnival mask while chasing Ethan through the Italian Streets with a metal pipe, sometimes slowly scrabbing it across the wall in dramatic fashion. I found it highly cartoonish and distracting, as it reminded me of The Joker’s Girlfriend, Harley Quinn; it took away from the drama and realism of the movie. In addition to some questionable CGI when furniture falls from a trainwreck, this movie is almost perfect. The film has a solid and worrying message about computers and artificial intelligence, which is apparent and appropriate in current society. Christopher McQuarrie again proves to be a master filmmaker of action movies and delivers this latest delightful explosive visual spectacle I didn’t want to end.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Movie Reviewer
