Continuing on from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) IMF team is once again saving the world. After a mission where they are trying to retrieve stolen plutonium cores goes wrong, they are forced to face off against a new faction that spawned from the remains of the recently defeated Syndicate and want to plunge the world into chaos.

With the CIA now on the IMF’s back after their failure, Hunt has to accept the help of Walker (Henry Cavill and his infamous moustache) whose own methods for doing his job are far more brutal but are necessary if he is to be able to find the cores before they are used. It’s not the most original of storylines as things seem to screw up a lot for the IMF team, but it’s how they get out these bad situations that makes the movie and it does it so well too.

Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames are back to lend support too.

Prior familiarity with the characters (including Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson) is used to this movie’s early advantage as it dives right into the action from the beginning and avoids stalling the remarkable pace that the film keeps throughout its length. They all get their moments to shine (more needed I think to give the audience a time out) but this is still a Tom Cruise movie… it might just be a most Tom Cruise movie you are ever going to see.

You’ve got to give Cruise credit as Hunt is almost as much of an unstoppable force as The Terminator – he may not have the same body count as a killer robot from the future but he keeps going and going and going… when you see some of the stunts he is involved in it can be stupefying to see him right there in the middle of it when most others would be using an army of stuntmen to do the same.

Being a Mission Impossible movie, there’s going to be betrayals, misdirection and lots of rubber masks and it’s full of them. Truthfully, the story can be a bit bonkers and parts are telegraphed from a mile away but it helps lend some context to why they attempt to do the crazy things they do. And with the sheer volume of great moments you get as a payoff it more than makes up for that concern.

Riding fast on a motorcycle is probably the easiest stunt Tom Cruise does in the film.

Mission Impossible: Fallout might just be the only movie I’ve seen this year that’s required me to sit down and consider having a nice cup of tea afterwards. It’s such a relentless experience that when the credits roll you need to catch your breath and give yourself a moment of peace before picking yourself up from the seat to go home.

Considering that 2018 had some of the biggest superhero movies EVER, this movie delivers its own share of spectacle and also sets a benchmark for the espionage thriller that I don’t think even James Bond can beat. It is enormously entertaining.