Mission: Impossible: Fallout (2018)

  I was going to wait and just catch this one on DVD or Netflix but it was getting such rave reviews, I had to see what the fuss was about.

And it's not bad!  It's exciting, it's funny, there are poignant moments, and Rebecca Ferguson kicks some serious ass.  There are also some interesting parallels between this and Mission:  Impossible III, which I will get to in a moment.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) fucks up a mission in Berlin, allowing three plutonium cores out in the world.  CIA director Sloane (Angela Bassett) thinks Ethan is falling apart and assigns her own man, August Walker (Henry Cavill), to watch Ethan and his team as they attempt to infiltrate the gala of the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), a black-market facilitator.  Ethan successfully wins the Widow's trust and learns that in order to get the plutonium, he must trade evil bad guy Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) for it.  Meanwhile, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) has been told by her MI-6 bosses that she can come back in if she brings them Lane to answer for his many crimes, pitting her against Ethan once more.  Of course it's all part of Lane's diabolical plan to make Hunt suffer and the team must set aside all their issues in order to prevent the situation from going mushroom-shaped.

Okay, the parallels.  This part might contain some minor spoilers for M:I3, if you haven't seen it, so I'm warning you now.  I think that Fallout rectifies everything that went wrong (within the story universe) for Ethan Hunt.  He failed to save his protégée, Lindsay Ferris (Keri Russell), from a super villain intent on destroying everything, Owan Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman, RIP), and he accidentally got his girlfriend, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), involved in his crazy spy life and nearly got her killed.  Okay, so in Fallout, his new protégée, Ilsa, is still a little green and naive about how cutthroat it is but she is waaaay more competent than Lindsay and shows herself to be more than capable of staying alive, even against an extremely intelligent and ruthless bad guy, Solomon Lane.  Julia, meanwhile, is happy and making her own choices free from the specter of her association with Ethan.  If the Mission: Impossible producers wanted a way to gracefully retire Ethan Hunt, this movie provides them the perfect opportunity to pass the torch to Ilsa.  It resolves all of Hunt's underlying fears and also hands the franchise to a younger woman capable of carrying it through the next decade.

Oh my God, you guys.  Mission:  Impossible has become the new Star Wars.  Movies 1-3 suck, 4-6 are great, and 7-9 are going to be female-led and probably hated by a toxic fandom.  I HAVE UNLOCKED SECRET KNOWLEDGE HERE!