This movie was a mess of an edit. It’s clearly a 3-hour-plus length movie that was edited down to 2 1/2 hours, which you obviously have to do for this type of movie. It suffers from this cutting down and is absolutely jam packed with plot, quick action, more plot, almost no humor, more plot, and some big action sequences.
But…this was the first movie in this series where I thought, “Uh, I’ve seen this stunt before or something very similar.” Every sequence felt similar to something I’ve seen from a previous Mission Impossible movie, except for the very well done train sequence at the end.
Anyway, it was still fun and I liked it, but it is the worst movie in the series except for the atrocious second film. I can see that Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie worked very hard to make this movie and put everything in it, but it ended up very poorly edited and was kind of a jumbled mess.
To expand on my thoughts above, I thought the movie was little more than a series of stunts connected by a thin yet incomprehensible plot. In the latter sense, it was reminiscent of when I watched the TV series when I was six years old. I was always driving the adults crazy with questions about what was happening. I didn’t do that in the theater though.
I really thought I would like the movie more than I did. Oh well. Maybe it’s me.
It isn’t just you. I don’t hate the movie and actually think quite a few things were really good, but it is a mess and the plot is not as interesting as they think.
I do know that the director talked about filming that entire car chase sequence before they had a full script and even understanding of who the main antagonist is and what is going on. They had planned that chase and filmed it; they spent other times working on the script so they could figure out what was going on.
Just got back from it and thought it was at best mediocre. The worst scenes in Fallout were better than the best scenes here.
Two new characters with no back story and we’re supposed to care. The fight choreography was pretty poor; very close shots on everything. Gabriel’s motivation is what? Multiple deus-ex machinas to save the day. Ethan crashing through the side of the train at exactly the right spot followed by his parachute catching wind at the exact right time was especially egregious. The behind the scenes short I saw of Cruise perfecting his motorcycle jump was better than the scenes in the movie.
I’m with Mahaloth that this is near the bottom of my MI list.
To be fair, then entire plot driver and ultimate antagonist is a literal (or at least literally virtual) deus ex machina which can predict the exact plot developments down to the individual scene, which means the screenwriter and director Christopher McQuarrie can write any nonsense plot development and justify it as “The Entity said it would happen”.
Frankly, I found this to be a pretty dull film despite all of the action setpieces and the excellent cinematography. So much of the character dialogue was pure exposition dump, not because it has a complex plot but due to the action of the film being hard to follow and character motivations unclear. It throws in a bunch of new characters with essentially no background or explanation of what they are doing, and for some reason brings back Kittridge from the original Mission: Impossible film (whose singular authority appears to be reassigning people to backwater postings) as an attempt at lampshading Vanessa Kirby’s character as a “blink and you’ll miss it” reference to being the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave’s ‘Max’ from the original film for no apparent reason. Briggs and Degas were so obviously there just to be kind of useless foils and viewer surrogates that I started referring to them as Rosencranz and Guildenstern.
And there are so many ‘plot complications’ that occur purely to try to ratchet up tension or create a reason for an action scene even though they have no actual consequences, and ends up just bloating the run time, as did the overlong train crash and the car chase, which was less inventive than the many prior car chases it so obviously filched from. The big motorcycle jump and BASE jumping scene that was so hyped up because Tom Cruise is doing his own stunt! could have actually been done completely by a stunt performer as you can’t actually see Cruise’s face and it was heavily CGI’d anyway. And yes, as noted, the film leans heavily on action tropes from previous installments and other films (especially Bond movies, although to be fair Skyfall lifted the ‘NOC list’ as the plot driver from the first M:I film without even bothering to try to wipe off fingerprints). Curiously, there were so many instances in the film where I thought it would be really useful if Emilio Estevez could pop in and offer Hunt a stick of “red light/green light” gum, but no, it’s basically the one thing that has never come up again.
The singular merit of the film is Haley Atwell who does a characteristically good performance with a pretty thin character, although the entire reason for ‘Grace’ to be in the film in the first place, much less involved in the latter half is so shoehorned into the plot that they might as well just have kept her chained at the wrist to Tom Cruise. Somehow she goes from just being a master pickpocket with an international reputation (how is this a thing) to an expert knife fighter and illusionist.
I think it is clear they filmed sequences in this movie without the full script, which is what I have read. The editing is just fine in the car chase and in the train sequence, but the story sections are very much “inserted” because they finalized them and shot them later.
I credit them for taking yet another entire year to get to the 8th one. I think they need to make sure it is better.
