Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
If you’ve seen any of the marketing for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, you’ve almost certainly seen the image of Tom Cruise gripping the side of a jet plane as it takes off. The outrageous stunt is real, and the laws of modern movie marketing would seem to dictate that this could well be the money shot for the whole movie. So there’s a certain refreshing pleasure in sitting down to watch the film and 
finding that the plane stunt happens right in the opening sequence. If the trailer’s big wowza moment is just table setting, what could the filmmakers have in store for the final showdown? The answer, as it turns out, is plenty, but also not quite enough. This Mission: Impossible is a remarkably fun and clever continuation of the franchise, but also occasionally frustrating in the way it fails to live up to its own standards.
Rogue Nation finds the top-secret daredevil government agency known as the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) in disarray. CIA director Hunley (Alec Baldwin) has successfully lobbied Congress to dismantle the organization, and orders IMF agent Brandt (Jeremy Renner) to bring his people in. Of course Ethan Hunt (Cruise), the most unconventional agent in the highly unconventional agency, has better things to do than turn in his badge. He and former IMF agent Benji (Simon Pegg) are on the trail of the Syndicate, an “anti-IMF” composed of missing and presumed-dead agents who have long been off the IMF’s grid. Alternately tussling and collaborating with a slippery British agent (Rebecca Ferguson), and with the IMF always just a step behind, saving the world has never been a bigger pain in the ass for Ethan and Benji.
For the audience, though, it’s kind of a blast – at least for the first two-thirds or so of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s script. McQuarrie’s never written a bigger or better twist than the now-classic ending of his The Usual Suspects, but he always manages to throw some unexpected tweaks even into essentially dull films like his 2012 Cruise vehicle Jack Reacher. You’d think throwing Tom Cruise on the side of a plane would be spectacle enough, but McQuarrie tosses in an extra surprise by having Hunt’s accomplice on the ground remotely open the wrong door of the plane as he attempts to let Hunt in. Later in the film’s first act, a handcuffed Hunt is provided with the keys to escape and fight his jailors – but he can’t reach the lock while cuffed, so he must fight while still restrained. None of this is earth-shattering stuff, but McQuarrie is adept at subverting his audience’s expectations of any given showdown in clever ways that will keep you wondering: “Now how is he going to get out of that?” Appropriate for a movie about impossible missions.
The action and surprises continue almost non-stop through a game of cat-and-mouse behind the scenes of an opera, an underwater heist, and a deftly edited motorcycle chase that seems to almost literally blow your hair back. And then…the air goes out of the whole thing a little bit. The movie’s third act is curiously devoid of the high-concept stunts and amusing reversals that make the preceding material so enjoyable. McQuarrie finally decides to focus on his ill-defined villain (Sean Harris) after basically ignoring him for most of the film, and introduces a secondary baddie into the mix as well. The action gets lighter and more generic – other than a climactic trap that requires simply too many coincidences for it to have worked as its creators planned, even by the high standards of disbelief suspension Mission: Impossible requires. Kudos to McQuarrie for front-loading the movie with that plane sequence, but by the end you’ll be wishing there was something equally smashing to bring the curtain down.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation still stays entertaining, though, thanks in large part to the remarkable charisma of Cruise and Ferguson. Pegg is also practically a lead here, but between this franchise and Star Trek, his hysterical nebbish stock character is wearing awfully thin. Ironically, Edgar Wright, the director who introduced Pegg to the public through Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, knows how to exploit Pegg’s versatility. Hollywood doesn’t. Pegg was introduced in Mission: Impossible 3, his role was beefed up in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and the audience’s affection for Benji is assumed far too much by this point. He needs to be phased out again for the next installment in favor of newcomer Ferguson, an immediately engaging Swedish actress with a poise and screen presence that recalls Ingrid Bergman. She’s appropriately cast for the complex, believable character McQuarrie has written, which dodges both the sex-object and the hey-she’s-a-girl-but-she-can-punch-too syndromes that so often define female characters in these kind of movies. She holds her own against Cruise and even saves his ass a few times. When Cruise finally decides he’s too old to hang off planes, someone hand the keys of this franchise to Ferguson. As long as the series’ scribes continue to write her character as strongly as McQuarrie does here, the show will be in good hands.
Patrick Dunn
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