The Quarantine Stream: ‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’ Will Thrill You, and Keep You Distracted From the Real World

(Welcome to The Quarantine Stream, a new series where the /Film team shares what they’ve been watching while social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The Movie: Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Where You Can Stream It: Hulu and Amazon Prime Video

The Pitch: The most recent Mission: Impossible entry once again finds Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt on a dangerous assignment – to stop an evil group from causing a global catastrophe. This gives Tom Cruise an excuse to risk bodily harm, and possibly his life, again and again – all for our entertainment!

Why It’s Essential Quarantine Viewing: Mission: Impossible – Fallout is such a non-stop, edge-of-your-seat action pic that your attention will remain riveted the entire time. You won’t want to take your eyes off the screen for fear of missing something amazing. As a result, the entire outside world – you know, the real world, where everything is terrible and life has become a nightmarish carnival run by circus clowns with borderline personality disorder – will cease to exist for the entire 2 hour and 27-minute runtime.

The Mission: Impossible series has become my favorite action franchise. You can keep your Fast and Furious saga. For me, it’s all about Tom Cruise risking his life all in the name of entertainment. For a while, the Mission franchise had a revolving door of interesting (and in some cases, great) filmmakers – Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird. A part of me misses that scenario – the prospect of a new, exciting filmmaker coming in to put their stamp on the series. But I’m also incredibly happy with Christopher McQuarrie, who has become the default filmmaker for the Mission movies.

McQuarrie directed Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which introduced the best character in the entire franchise – Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson. Ferguson’s performance as the femme fatale who can literally murder people with her legs became almost instantly iconic, and for the first time ever, the series brought back one of its female leads for the sequel. Ferguson returns in Fallout, although her screentime is sadly limited a bit due to the fact that the actress was pregnant during filming.

Fallout is very much a follow-up to Rogue Nation. But it also pays tribute to every other film in the series so far, something the other sequels had ignored, with each movie serving as its own standalone. As a result, Rogue Nation is a real treat for fans of the series as it revisits themes, and characters, we’ve grown familiar with. It also brings in some new faces, namely Henry Cavill, as a rogue CIA agent who gets sent on the mission with Hunt. Cavill’s work here illustrates how badly the DCEU movies have wasted his talents, and it’s a joy to watch his smarmy performance, and an even bigger joy to watch him pump both his fists during a fight as if his arms are guns he’s loading.

Since Mission: Impossible has become known for its stunts, each movie has to keep upping the game, and Rogue Nation is no exception. There’s an incredible HALO jump sequence; a pulse-pounding motorcycle chase; a bathroom fight that kicks all kind of ass; a helicopter chase that starts off with Tom Cruise climbing up a rope to get into a chopper already in flight (he slips and falls at one point, catching himself at the last minute), and a climactic battle on the edge of a cliff – a literal cliffhanger. The entire experience will have your heart racing as it keeps your mind off of everything else. What’s not to love?

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