Mission: Impossible - Fallout movie review: An appreciable 'Stun' Spectacle

The incomprehensible plot is replete with extended and expansive sequences that showcase Tom Cruise as a stuntman extraordinaire - taking incredibly dangerous risks, performing the most bizarre stunts all over central Paris, London and even closer to the Siachen Glacier - on every conceivable mode of transportation. The problem though is that Cruise is not supposed to be a stuntman- just an IMF agent. And if being an IMF agent means being able to perform the most unbelievable and incredibly timed stunts then why were his co-workers Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), lagging behind?

Ethan Hunt and his IMF team find themselves in a race against time after a mission goes wrong. It's the standard game-changer for every MI movie. And ostensibly, it's MI6 agent Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) who went over to the dark side in 'Rogue Nation,' behind the stealing of the 3 weapons-grade plutonium balls that has every agency across the world on high alert.

It's all that racing around that seems so strange, though. Everything and everyone around appear to have gone into slow-mo mode just so that Cruise and Company can speed up their act. Cruise and McQuarrie seem to have been aiming for broke, amping up the adrenaline gush to such an extent that there'd be no way to go one-up on this. Cruise's injury probably had a lot to do with this strategy and combine that with the fact that after 'Rogue Nation' there wasn't anywhere else to go with a premise of this sort.

The set-piece that kick-starts the adrenaline gush is the one where Ethan and August(Henry Cavill) jump out of a plane, the latter gets struck by lightning, an airborne Cruise manoeuvres himself to reach him, re-places the Oxygen supply to get him breathing again and then the duo land directly on the Grand Palais where they are supposed to be attending a meeting with the "White Widow," a wildly wealthy philanthropist and apparent part-time arms dealer(Vanessa Kirby). There's MI6 agent from Rogue Nation, Ilsa Faust(Rebecca Fergusson) to contend with too. IMF chief (Alec Baldwin), all-too-briefly gets to lord over CIA head(Angela Bassett) before things go south again. The stunts just go 'unimaginable' along the way. Lorne Balfe's sharp renditions of Lalo Schifrin's original themes add musical muscle to the contrived mayhem. The self-aware humor and the outlandish set-pieces don't make for a combustible combo though. The finale set-piece is said to be in Kashmir but looks like it's been shot in Norway and New Zealand. And the 'Doomsday' proposition is so done-to-death that it doesn't quite mean the same thing anymore. This one is expository, manipulative entertainment and you may well admire the daring-do for a large part of the overly stretched runtime.

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