Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Fallout

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

AH, preconceptions: you go to the movies with a heavy heart, aware that this is the sixth film in a franchise and the lead actor is no longer the sculpted figure who wooed us in Top Gun, but is just a few years off his free bus. How will he pull off an action hero stance? Can the scriptwriters create anything we haven’t seen before? And clocking in at 147 minutes, that’s a hefty number of tough guy lines to fidget through…

But joy comes best when you least expect it, and my oh my does MIF smack you round the chops, tie you in knots, and thoroughly entertain from start to finish.

Tom Cruise first made a Mission Impossible film in 1996 and this latest is an absolute stunner.

First, the plot is complete no-nonsense – it doesn’t try to be clever and glories in its clichés: a group of unidentified terrorists, led by crazed anarchist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), are involved in a deal to buy three cannonballs loaded with plutonium and then detonate them to cause as much chaos and death as they can. The bombs are on a timer – as if Wile E Cayote had designed them – and the baddies all come from Central Casting.

But this unashamed nod to what we want from an action film is so blatant it adds to the film’s charm, like a supercharged contemporary instalment of John Steed and Emma Peel’s Avengers.

Ethan Hunt (Cruise), and his sidekicks Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) have to track down and disarm the bombs before the timers go ping.

But what a ride to do so – this is action film stuff at its very best.

Every scene seems to have a switcheroo plot twist, and intelligently thought out, too – every a-ha! moment works, and there are plenty of them.

We have extraordinary chases though European cities – this film makes the most of Paris, and then flips us over the Channel to have Ethan Hunt rushing through a memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral, dashing across roof tops at Waterloo, and heading over Blackfriars Bridge with Parliament as the background before taking us into Tate Modern.

Then, in what is the cherry on a very delicious cake, the action switches to Kashmir and we’re treated to a showdown that is one of the most vertigo-inducing fights scene ever committed to celluloid.

Sitting on the back row of the Leicester Square Imax, I tore my claws into the seat in front of me, felt an uneasy clamminess creep across my body, and battled to hold down my breakfast.

It was completely absorbing and Cruise, who still likes to do his own stunts, is insanely good at all this.