In Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018), a mission to recover three plutonium cores fails because Ethan Hunt chooses to save a member of his team. The cores fall into the hands of the Apostles, the remnants of Solomon Lane’s Syndicate, who are working with an extremist known only as John Lark. The head of the CIA, Erica Sloane, no longer trusts the IMF’s methods and imposes on Ethan a companion: August Walker, one of her own agents, sent with instructions to consider anyone expendable. Sloane presents the difference between the two men as the difference between a scalpel and a hammer. Walker behaves accordingly: he is impatient, violent and contemptuous of Ethan’s scruples. Halfway through the film he is revealed as John Lark himself, the author of a manifesto that claims there can be no peace without first a great suffering. He has been using the investigation to frame Ethan. In Kashmir, Walker and Lane arm two nuclear devices aimed at the water supply of India, Pakistan and China. Ethan stops him in a helicopter chase; Walker dies impaled on a cargo hook at the edge of a cliff.
// The theoryStop asking why
In the 1970s, after a decade of rising crime in the United States, James Q. Wilson published Thinking About Crime (1975). His argument was that criminology had wasted too much effort on “root causes”—poverty, discrimination, family—that policy could not change quickly. What governments could do was make crime less attractive and keep offenders off the streets: more certain punishment, incapacitation of repeat offenders, and attention to disorder. Wilson’s work, later developed with George Kelling in broken windows and with Richard Herrnstein, became the intellectual basis of what British criminologists named right realism. Its critics pointed to the policies that followed: mass incarceration, aggressive policing and the language of a “war on crime”. The sociologist Peter Kraska documented how that language came with real militarization of police forces. The logic of war has a well-known danger: when the enemy must be defeated at any cost, the limits on the defenders’ violence begin to look like obstacles.
The scalpel and the hammer
Fallout turns a debate about policy into a conflict between two agents. Ethan represents the restraint that right realism’s critics defend: he risks the mission to save a colleague, refuses to kill an innocent policewoman to keep his cover, and believes that how one wins matters. Walker represents the opposite principle, the one Sloane hires him for: results first, and anyone can be sacrificed. The CIA chooses him because he does not hesitate. What the film reveals is that this was not just a professional style but a worldview: the conviction that peace can only come through destruction. In Walker, the hammer has stopped being a tool of the order he served and has become a program of its own. The institution that values ruthlessness above all has recruited, without knowing it, its most dangerous enemy.
// The subjectThe agent who despised restraint
Walker is physically imposing and openly contemptuous. From the first scenes he treats Ethan’s caution as weakness and his compassion as a security risk. He is willing to kill to keep a cover and to use anyone as bait. That attitude makes him perfect for his double game: nobody in the CIA is surprised by his brutality, because it is exactly what he was hired for. As John Lark, he writes the manifesto of the Apostles and plans a catastrophe designed to destroy the existing order. The two identities are not as different as they seem. The agent who believed that only force maintains order and the terrorist who believes that only destruction can produce peace share the same premise: violence is the real language of politics, and those who refuse to speak it are naïve.
August Walker
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// The crackA theory about crime policy, applied to a spy
Right realism is a theory about how states should respond to ordinary crime, not about the psychology of agents. Applying it to Walker is an analogy: the film uses the same opposition—force against restraint, results against means—in the world of counter-terrorism. The analogy has limits. Wilson never defended torture or the killing of innocents, and many right realists would see Walker as exactly the kind of uncontrolled agent their policies were supposed to restrain. The theory also says nothing about why Walker betrays his country; that belongs to ideology, to Lane’s influence and to his own nihilism.
What the analogy does capture is the institutional risk. When an agency values toughness above everything, it selects and rewards people for whom limits are an inconvenience, and it loses the ability to see when one of them crosses the line. Walker hides in plain sight because his brutality looks like professionalism. Walker chose to plan the contamination of the water of billions of people. What the critique of right realism adds is a warning: a security policy that treats restraint as weakness can produce the very violence it claims to fight.
When the hammer is the problem
Real investigations into abuses by security forces—in counter-terrorism, in wars and in policing—keep finding a similar pattern: units that were praised for their effectiveness, cultures that treated rules as obstacles and leaders who looked the other way because the results were good. The criminological debate between realism and its critics is not only academic. It decides whether a society measures security by how many enemies are defeated or by how much violence it takes to defeat them. Fallout puts the question in its most dramatic form: the CIA’s hammer was the terrorist all along. The less spectacular version is more common: the hammer that slowly forgets what it was supposed to protect.
Three key ideas
- Right realism (Wilson, 1975) holds that crime policy should not chase root causes but control, deter and incapacitate offenders. Its extreme version turns security into a war in which restraint looks like weakness (Kraska, 2001).
- August Walker, the CIA agent Erica Sloane imposes on Ethan Hunt as a “hammer” with orders to consider anyone expendable, is revealed to be John Lark, the extremist who plans with Lane to contaminate the water of India, Pakistan and China. He dies on a cliff in Kashmir.
- The crack: right realism is a theory of crime policy, and Wilson never defended what Walker does; the analogy captures the institutional risk, not his motive. Even so, Walker chose mass murder.
Sources · further reading
- Wilson, J. Q. (1975). Thinking About Crime. Basic Books.
- Kraska, P. B. (ed.) (2001). Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police. Northeastern University Press.
- Young, J. (1994). “Incessant Chatter: Recent Paradigms in Criminology”. In M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Oxford University Press.
- McQuarrie, C. (dir.) (2018). Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Paramount Pictures.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is August Walker?
August Walker (“John Lark”) is a villain from Mission: Impossible, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. They sent him to hunt a terrorist called John Lark, with orders to consider anyone expendable.
Why does August Walker (John Lark) become a villain?
August Walker and right realism: in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the CIA sends its most brutal agent to watch Ethan Hunt because a scalpel is not enough and a hammer is needed. Right realism argued that crime is fought with force, not by understanding its causes. Walker is that principle pushed so far that it changes sides.
Which criminological theory explains August Walker?
August Walker's case is analysed through Right realism. Right realism (James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime, 1975) held that searching for the root causes of crime is useless for criminal policy: what works is incapacitating, deterring and firmly controlling those who choose to offend. Its extreme version turns security into a war and force into the only serious answer. August Walker, the CIA agent of Fallout (2018), embodies that logic: a man his agency chooses precisely because he has no scruples. The film reveals that the same conviction—that order can only be achieved through violence—has taken him to the other side.
