Cruise on the Hunt yet again.
Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie
Written by: Christopher McQuarrie (screenplay), Drew Pearce, McQuarrie (story)
Starring: Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Jeremy Renner, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris, Alec Baldwin
The H-Bomb: After years of leaving a trail of destruction in its wake, the IMF is officially disbanded by CIA Director Alan Hunley (Baldwin). This does nothing to deter the IMF’s top agent, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) from continuing his mission to track down “The Syndicate,” a shadowy terror network that he believes is responsible for a number of large scale attacks around the world. Unfortunately, this network is so good at covering its tracks, the CIA doesn’t even believe it exists.
So, now officially disavowed, Hunt is forced to go it alone as he hops the globe, tracking the movements of The Syndicate and its ruthless leader, Solomon Lane (Harris). Eventually, Hunt does recruit the members of his old IMF team, Benjie (Pegg), Brandt (Renner), and Luther (Rhames), to aid him in this most impossible mission. He also finds himself crossing paths with Isla Faust (Ferguson), a mysterious lass who claims to be a double agent who has successfully infiltrated The Syndicate. Her actions, however, do leave Hunt wondering, can he really trust her…?
Much like The Fast and the Furious series, Mission: Impossible is a true anomaly among movie franchises, in that it gets better, instead of worse, with each passing film. The original 1996 film, directed by cinematic style maestro Brian De Palma, is a solid film, though it is saddled with a slow pace and a needlessly convoluted narrative. The second installment, directed by John Woo, is packed with over-the-top gun-play and far too many impossible stunts. Nowadays it’s considered the redheaded stepchild of the series.
When JJ Abrams took the reigns in 2006 with Mission: Impossible III, the series finally hit its stride, with a near perfect blend of action and intrigue, as well as a healthy dose of humor thrown in for good measure. Ghost Protocol followed the third film’s model, and even improved on it in a number of ways. Now, nearly twenty years after the original, we have Mission: Impossible- Rogue Nation, a tremendously entertaining action yarn that is, in my humble opinion, the very best MI flick to date.
Written and Directed by Christopher McQuarrie (Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects), this film doesn’t try to go deep in any way, or pretend that it’s anything that it’s not, it simply sets out to be an engaging thrill ride, and to that end, it succeeds in spades. Yes, the plot basically has Ethan Hunt going rogue. Yes, this is not the first time he has had to do that in this series, but the film does such a good job of giving us fans what we want, that we can forgive the story for not exactly being novel.
Essentially, the plot is there to get us from one action set piece to the next, and hot damn, do Cruise and McQuarrie deliver the goods in that department. The standout is a sniper sequence in an Italian opera house that gradually ratchets up the tension, and would most definitely have made Hitchcock proud. That’s to take nothing away from the film’s centerpiece, involving an elaborate break-in in which Hunt must dive into a giant underground water tank in order to retrieve some file. It’s an utterly ridiculous sequence on paper, yet is so well executed on screen that it actually keeps us on the edge of our seats, holding our breath right along with Mr. Hunt.
It’s a sequence that hilariously lampoons the facial masks that the series have used and abused in the past, and the high speed motorcycle chase that follows is a glorious mix of chaos and carnage. In other words, it is pretty fucking cool. But I feel I’m revealing too much, so I shall switch focus to the series’ star, Mr. Tom Cruise. What can I say, five films in, at fifty-three years of age, Cruise has still got it. Not only can he be charming when he needs to be charming, or menacing when he needs to be menacing, he can pull off the physical shit like it ain’t no thing. The idea of someone being able to hang onto the side of an airplane as it’s in flight is totally ludicrous, but Cruise makes it look completely credible. Hunt is a character Cruise could play in his sleep, nevertheless, he is wide awake and still bringing his A-game.
Pegg returns as Benji, the Halo-playing computer geek of the team, and this time, he’s given more to do than ever. Playing more than simply the comic relief, he gets some straight up dramatic moments, which he nails. He’s come a long way since his character’s introduction in MI-III, and I certainly hope to see more of him in future installments. Harris is absolutely ice cold as the slimy, euro trash villain who manages to stay two steps ahead of Hunt throughout. No one will ever top the late Philip Seymour Hoffman from the third film, but Harris is nice and creepy in his own right.
Renner and Rhames, returning from previous entries, are kept out of the action for the most part, and aren’t given much to do, while Alec Baldwin’s CIA Chief is a cliched bureaucratic blowhard, the kind of dumb-ass fucking knucklehead of a character who constantly gets in the hero’s way and makes unnecessary trouble for him. Really could have done without him. On the other hand, another newcomer to the cast, Ferguson, is a most welcome addition. Being believably adept at hand-to-hand combat, she is a dead sexy ass-kicker, and her chemistry with Cruise is terrific. She nearly steals the movie with her performance, so much so that this could be a break out role for her.
In a summer that, for the most part, has been depressingly lackluster and underwhelming, Mission: Impossible- Rogue Nation is a much needed change of pace. Like I said earlier, we’re now on the fifth film of this series, and both it, and Cruise, still have plenty of life left in them. As far as negatives go, I will confess that it’s not exactly a game changer, in either the series, or the spy thriller genre, in general. But that’s not at all what it set out to be. It set out to be a fast, funny, two-hour-and-ten-minute adrenaline rush of a flick, and at that, it succeeds admirably.
