Mission Impossible - Fallout: The Amazing Race with nuclear weapons

I don’t know anyone who dislikes the Mission: Impossible movies. Also, I don’t know anyone who absolutely loves them. Like, I have buddies that when they see a new Mission: Impossible is coming out, they’re jazzed.

But it’s not like the people I know that start looking for Easter eggs and casting information the second a new Marvel movie is announced.

The sixth (Holy crap! Is that right?) Mission: Impossible movie is called Fallout. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team at the IMF are trying to find plutonium that an evil group called The Apostles plans to use to wipe out a third of the world’s population.

The mission takes Hunt and company to Paris where they are ordered to intercept a potential buyer and Apostles leader John Lark. John Lark and the Apostles is an awesome band name by the way. I could see them as the opener that steals the show on a tour with like…Mumford & Sons maybe.

Or someone even cooler, like, say, Jason Isbell.

Hunt can’t use his usual “by any means necessary” tactics. The CIA has grown suspicious of the IMF and implanted a spy of their own on the mission.

His name is Agent Walker, and he is played by Henry Cavill in what, as far as I can tell, is Cavill’s only non-Superman role.

Fun side note here: Cavill was in the middle of shooting this movie while also showing up for reshoots of Justice League. He sports a mustache in this film, so Warner Brothers had to digitally edit a mustache off of Superman in some scenes of Justice League. Look, there is no saving the Justice League script, but imagine how much better the movie would have been with a Superman that sometimes had a mustache and other times did not!

Mission: Impossible - Fallout is a lot of fun.

Tom Cruise, despite whatever you think of him and the Church of Scientology, is a bonafide movie star. It is hard not to be charmed by him. Plus, this recent turn his career has taken since 2011, where Cruise suddenly has a sense of humor about himself, really allows him to lean into the ridiculousness of action roles.

The movie takes the IMF team from California to DC to Paris to London to a remote Asian mountain village. It’s like The Amazing Race with nuclear terrorism! The whole thing is ripe with laughter. Granted, that is because most of the film takes place in Europe and there is nothing funnier than a group of European street toughs running. I can’t explain why that’s the case, but it’s true.

The Mission: Impossible movies seem to be experiencing their Fast & Furious-esque renaissance. The first movie isn’t bad. The next two were.

The fourth and fifth movies showed a bit of an uptick, and now here we are at number six and the series is downright fun.

Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie really leans on fun instead of feats of bada**ery. There’s a car chase in Paris that isn’t even close to geographically correct, and the city is full of cops that only try to catch criminals once, and if the criminals get away, the pursuit is over. But those kind of things fit really well.

After all, this is a movie franchise built around the idea that masks of mysterious terrorists and voice changers are readily available.

As summer starts to wind down, I find myself in a bit of a quandary. There isn’t much that I’ve disliked. At the same time, not much has really wowed me. Mission: Impossible - Fallout is the perfect picture of that. It is a fun, harmless movie that I will probably forget that I saw by this time next year.