“ | Good evening, Mr. Hunt. The anarchist, Solomon Lane: since you captured him two years ago, his absence from the world stage has had unintended consequences. His Syndicate of rogue covert operatives continues to wreak havoc around the globe. The CIA's Special Activities Division has relentlessly hunted Lane's elite network of hostiles. But many remain unknown and at large. The remnants of this extremist splinter cell, refer to themselves as 'the Apostles'. They have since adopted a policy of terror for hire, making them an even greater threat. They are responsible for the recent smallpox outbreak in Indian-controlled Kashmir, along the borders of China and Pakistan, threatening one third of the world's population. The epidemic is being contained, but intelligence would indicate that a new client has hired the Apostles for a more ambitious operation. They have been contacted by this man: an unidentified extremist known only by the code name 'John Lark', author of this apocalyptic manifesto, calling for the destruction of the current world order. It is believed Lark is responsible for the disappearance of Norwegian nuclear weapons specialist Nils Delbruuk. Dr. Delbruuk's security clearance was revoked after he expressed fiercely anti-religious views. Meanwhile, the Apostles have been in contact with elements of the Easter-European underworld, who were in possession of three plutonium cores, stolen from a missile base in Eastern Russia. This would indicate that John Lark and the Apostles are working together to acquire functioning nuclear weapons. NEST estimates that a man with Delbruuk's knowledge, using the materials in play, could complete three nuclear weapons in as little as 72 hours. These devices would be man portable and deployable anywhere on Earth overnight. In the hands of John Lark and the Apostles, these weapons represent an unprecedented threat to countless millions. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prevent the Apostles from acquiring plutonium, using any means at your disposal. If you, or any members of your IMF team, are caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck, Ethan. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. | ” |
–IMF mission briefing |
Mission: Impossible – Fallout is an American action/thriller film that was announced after the success of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. It is the sixth installment in the Mission: Impossible film series. The movie grossed over $791 million and remained Tom Cruise's highest-grossing movie until 2022's Top Gun Maverick which made over $1.2 billion. In Fallout, a mission gone wrong results in the reformed Syndicate (now known as the Apostles) getting their hands on black-market plutonium, forcing Ethan and his team to partner with a mysterious CIA agent in order to get it back. It was followed by the 2023 sequel Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, the first part of the franchise's two-part finale.
Plot[]
Two years after the capture of Solomon Lane, the remains of his organization The Syndicate have reformed into a terrorist group known as The Apostles. At an IMF safehouse in Belfast, Ethan Hunt receives details of a mission to intercept the sale of three plutonium cores to members of the group, who are acquiring them for their latest client, fundamentalist John Lark. The mission takes him to Berlin where he meets up with Benji Dunn and Luther Stickell, but the mission fails when Luther is taken hostage and Ethan's attempt to save him results in the Apostles escaping with the plutonium. The team quickly captures and interrogates a nuclear weapons expert, Nils Debruuk, who has been working with the group to build three portable nuclear weapons, tricking him into believing attacks have occurred on religious sites in Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca to obtain information on the Apostles' next move.
At Ramstein Air Base, Erika Sloane, Director of the CIA, instructs Special Activities operative August Walker to shadow Ethan, as he attempts to retrieve the plutonium. Ethan and Walker HALO jump into Paris, where they infiltrate a fundraiser party at the Grand Palais where Lark is set to buy the cores from the Apostles, with the arms dealer known as the White Widow acting as a broker. Ethan and Walker track Lark to a bathroom where in the subsequent fight, Lark is killed by Ilsa Faust. To complete the mission, Ethan impersonates John Lark and meets the White Widow via a Dunhill Drop.
Contract killers have been sent by other terrorist organizations to kill Lark in order to rule him out of the bidding war for the plutonium cores; with Ethan impersonating Lark, he escapes with White Widow. In order to secure the plutonium, the White Widow tasks Ethan with securing an asset; the price of securing the plutonium is the extraction of Solomon Lane from an armored convoy moving through Paris. Ethan receives one of the plutonium cores as a payment in kind for the mission. Ethan and his team attack the convoy and loyalties of the team are tested; Ilsa reveals that MI6 wants Lane dead. A motorcycle and car chase ensues across Paris, with Ethan avoiding the White Widow's forces, the police and Ilsa, who has to kill Lane to fulfill her mission for MI6. The mission to extract Lane is successful, whereupon White Widow instructs the team to deliver Lane, as well as Ilsa, to London.
At the safehouse in London, Alan Hunley, Secretary of IMF, confronts Hunt about being Lark, which Ethan denies and incapacitates Hunley to continue the mission. After being asked to monitor Lane, Walker unwittingly reveals himself to be the real John Lark, in association with Lane. Sloane also notices and instructs a shadow CIA team to take Lane, Walker and Ethan’s team in. However, unbeknownst to Sloane, the CIA is, in fact, infiltrated by the Apostles thanks to Walker, who orders them to attack the IMF team. Hunley is killed in the ensuing fight by Walker, who then escapes. With the help of Benji, Luther and Ilsa, Ethan pursues Walker across the city's rooftops, from St Paul's Cathedral to Tate Modern, where Walker escapes to a medical camp in Kashmir with Lane, but not before threatening the life of Ethan's estranged wife, Julia. In Kashmir, Benji and Faust reveal the two remaining nuclear weapons can be defused as long as the countdown is running, but as they are synchronised, if one is defused, the other will detonate. To bypass this, the fuse must also be pulled from the detonator before the countdown reaches zero, otherwise the weapon will detonate. Lane and Walker's plan for the weapons is to contaminate the water supply of Pakistan, India and China, affecting a third of the world's population (already threatened by a smallpox outbreak in the area) and thus pushing the world into chaos and anarchy, from which they hope and believe a new world order will emerge.
At the medical camp, where the abundance of radiology equipment is being used to disguise the radioactive signature of the bombs, Walker has also engineered for Julia and her new husband, Erik, to be onsite to raise the stakes for Ethan. Lane activates the weapons, giving the detonator to Walker. Ethan takes off in pursuit of Walker in a helicopter leaving Benji, Luther and Ilsa on the ground to find the weapons. Luther finds the first weapon and is helped by Julia to defuse it. Ilsa and Benji find the second weapon and fight with Lane, with Benji nearly being killed, before Ilsa rescues him and subdues Lane. The two defuse the second weapon. Ethan and Walker engage in an aerial helicopter chase, before Ethan uses his helicopter to ram Walker's aircraft out of the sky. The two then fight on a cliff edge, where Hunt kills Walker by pulling the rope of a fallen helicopter’s cargo hook, which lands onto his face, making his body alongside the helicopter fall off the cliff. With only one second to go, Ethan manages to remove the fuse, successfully aborting both detonations.
In the aftermath, the remaining two cores are safely recovered. Sloane hands Lane over to MI6 through the White Widow, which earns Ilsa's exoneration. Ethan recovers from his injuries with the help of Julia while the rest of the team joins him in victory.
Cast[]
- Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt
- Henry Cavill as August Walker
- Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell
- Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn
- Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust
- Sean Harris as Solomon Lane
- Angela Bassett as Erika Sloane
- Vanessa Kirby as White Widow
- Michelle Monaghan as Julia Meade-Hunt
- Wes Bentley as Erik
- Frederick Schmidt as Zola Mitsopolis
- Alec Baldwin as Alan Hunley
- Kristoffer Joner as Nils Delbruuk
Music[]
- A Storm Is Coming
- Your Mission
- Should You Choose To Accept...
- The Manifesto
- Good Evening, Mr. Hunt
- Change of Plan
- A Terrible Choice
- Fallout
- Stairs and Rooftops
- No Hard Feelings
- Free Fall
- The White Widow
- I Am the Storm
- The Exchange
- Steps Ahead
- Escape Through Paris
- We Are Never Free
- Kashmir
- Fate Whispers to the Warrior
- And the Warrior Whispers Back
- Unfinished Business
- Scalpel and Hammer
- The Syndicate
- Cutting on One
- The Last Resort
- Mission: Accomplished
Reception[]
Box Office[]
Mission: Impossible – Fallout grossed $220.2 million in the United States and Canada, and $571 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $791.1 million, against a production budget of $178 million, becoming the highest-grossing Mission: Impossible film.
In the United States and Canada, Fallout was released alongside Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, and was projected to gross $48–65 million in its opening weekend, with some estimates going as high as $75 million. It opened in 4,386 theaters, the most ever for the franchise and the seventh-widest release of all time. The film made $6 million from Thursday night previews (including $1 million from IMAX screenings), the highest of the series, a record for Cruise, and a 50% increase from Rogue Nation's $4 million. It went on to debut to $61.2 million, the best of the series and the second-highest of Cruise's career. It made $35.3 million in its second weekend to remain in first and marked the best sophomore frame of the franchise. The film made $19.4 million in its third weekend, finishing second behind newcomer The Meg.
In other territories, the film was projected to debut to $75–80 million from 36 countries, for an estimated total global opening of around $135 million. It made $15 million on its first day, including $2.8 million in South Korea. The film ended up overperforming, debuting at $92 million overseas for a worldwide total of $153.5 million. Its largest markets were China ($181 million), South Korea ($24.9 million), the United Kingdom ($9.5 million), and India ($8.2 million). By its third weekend of release, the most significant markets outside the US were: South Korea ($46.4 million), the UK ($22.4 million), India ($13.5 million), Taiwan ($11.9 million), Mexico ($10.8 million), Brazil ($9.6 million) and UAE ($6.4 million).
Critics[]
Mission: Impossible - Fallout is often regarded as the franchise's best instalment as well as one of the best action movies of the 2010s.
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 97% based on 442 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Fast, sleek, and fun, Mission: Impossible – Fallout lives up to the 'impossible' part of its name by setting yet another high mark for insane set pieces in a franchise full of them.", The site's Audience Score is at 88% with over 10,000 verified ratings. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 86 out of 100, based on 60 critics, indicating "universal acclaim." Audiences polled by PostTrak gave the film an 84% overall positive score and a 65% "definite recommend," while CinemaScore reported filmgoers gave it an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, the highest ever for the series.
Variety's Peter Debruge called the film "the series' most exciting installment yet," saying, "McQuarrie clearly believes in creating coherent set pieces: His combat scenes are tense, muscular, and clean, shot and edited in such a way that the spatial geography makes sense." David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film a grade of "A" and called it one of the best action films ever, writing "He's only Tom Cruise because nobody else is willing to be—or maybe he's only Tom Cruise so that nobody else has to be. Either way, Fallout is the film he's always promised us, and it is worth the wait." Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty also gave the film an "A" grade, commenting on Cruise that "He's still Hollywood's hungriest movie star", with the series getting "better, twistier and more deliriously fun with each installment". George Simpson of The Express complimented "the action is brutal and gut-punching, the pacing heart-pumping and the stakes so high it's gasp-inducing at times," adding, "Fallout is an improvement on all the previous films' failings, drawing together all the best aspects of them; simultaneously giving off that classic vibe of the original while never being afraid to continually evolve;" he gave the film five out of five stars. The Telegraph's Tim Robey summed up the film as "spectacular and eye-popping," deeming it "the blockbuster of the summer" with "a pleasingly sinuous plot," and calling the film and its series a "Bond-like franchise"; he also rated the film five out of five stars.
Robert Abele of TheWrap described Cruise as an "evergreen movie star with the daredevil heart of a stuntman" and that he "puts every ounce of effort he can into the long, hard work of maintaining a blockbuster franchise." The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy praised director Christopher McQuarrie, saying that with Mission: Impossible – Fallout he "tops what he did with Cruise three years ago," and also singled out Vanessa Kirby for playing her character with "a mix of elegance and frisky abandon." J.R. Kinnard of PopMatters wrote, "Though it lacks the gritty humanity of something like George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Mission: Impossible – Fallout is no less impressive in its dedication to character-driven action and practical special effects. It's a dazzling, non-stop thriller that's sure to become an instant action classic." Screen Daily's Tim Grierson wrote, "Tom Cruise is on fighting form in this thrilling franchise topper... [he is] ageless, riveting and seemingly unstoppable," further adding that "the sixth film in the series is among the most outstanding, delivering a near-exhausting amount of stupendous action sequences paired with deft character drama and the requisite life-or-death stakes." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film three out of five stars, saying "there isn't as much [humor] in the dialogue as before," but added, "Crashes and petrolhead spills are what this franchise is reasonably expected to deliver. And this is what it cheerfully does."
Sight & Sound's Nick Pinkerton wrote, "A strong contender for the most consistently cinematic franchise of the last 25 years, the Mission: Impossible films also offer a case study in the idea of the actor as auteur, with Tom Cruise continuing to present himself as a fearless screen immortal in Fallout."
The film was listed in 53 critics' Top 10 movies of 2018.