The Mission: Impossible film series has been going on for so long that the first movie was about heisting floppy disks. Watching it today, it may as well have been about boosting Betamax players lined with asbestos. People born after that first one are now legally able to vote, rent porn, and drink to the point of enjoying Mission: Impossible 2. And yet somehow these movies are still going strong. So we'd like to take a moment, apropos of nothing, to highlight the genius that is Mission: Impossible -- Fallout.

Why is the most recent entry in this aged series so damn good? After all, by their sixth movie, Friday The 13th had already killed off and revived Jason Voorhees roughly 5,000 times. Perhaps what makes Fallout stand out in our nostalgia-filled culture (in which every piece of intellectual property that ever appeared on a T-shirt gets a fresh-faced reinvention) is that it's basically an anti-reboot. Fallout is a two-and-a-half-hour repudiation of everything reboot culture is about. Sure, the original movie was a hip reinvention of a classic TV series featuring an attractive young cast and a hip new version of the theme song by the two more affordable members of U2. But even that movie was oddly subversive, making the hero of the TV show into the film's villain.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

These days, we're constantly inundated with "fresh" takes on old franchises in which a cast of young characters take the reigns from established characters played by haggard actors you grew up watching, be it Spock, Han Solo, Rocky Balboa, or multiple geriatric Terminators. The recent Mission: Impossible movies contrive similar character dynamics, only to reject them. Take Jeremy Renner in Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol. When he was first cast, it was widely reported that he was "being groomed to replace Tom Cruise."

The Hollywood Reporter

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

After all, Cruise was almost 50. Why not hand off the franchise to someone 10 years his junior? Renner, it seemed, had become the understudy for movie super spies, set to take over for Ethan Hunt just as he did (briefly) for Jason Bourne. But when Ghost Protocol came out, Renner's character is a pencil-pushing weenie, whereas Ethan Hunt scales the tallest building in the entire goddamn world. Renner only existed to threaten Cruise, then make him look awesome by comparison. And since Matt Damon decided to do another Bourne movie, Renner was forced to turn to the douchey celebrity app industry.

In Fallout, they similarly pair Cruise with a hot young actor, Henry Cavill -- yeah, fucking Superman. Cavill also starred in his own movie update of a 1960s spy show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. So this real-world threat to Cruise's career is introduced as a rival to Hunt. But even though Cavill may be younger, handsomer, and more ripped than Axl Rose's jeans, Hunt consistently shows us that he is the more valuable character. We get multiple scenes wherein Hunt shows off how much tougher and more capable he is than Cavill's CIA goon, Walker. Whether that's winning a fistfight with an enemy who bested Walker, even after he cocked his arm guns (and magically sprouted more facial hair) ...

Paramount Pictures

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

... or saving Walker's life after he passes out parachuting. This in a scene that was accomplished not with green screen, but by actually having Cruise and a dude with a camera on his head jump out of an airplane.