7.5 out of 10
Cast:
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt
Jeremy Renner as William Brandt
Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn
Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust
Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell
Sean Harris as Solomon Lane
Alec Baldwin as Alan Hunley
Simon McBurney as Attlee
Zhang Jingchu as Lauren
Jens Hultén as Janik “Bone Doctor” Vinter
Tom Hollander as the Prime Minister
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Review:
The Mission: Impossible series has always been about misdirection, which has been both its greatest strength and greatest weakness, allowing for a constant stream of enticing plots while simultaneously keeping the characters at a remove from the audience and potentially unnecessary from the greater enjoyment of the franchise. The newest entry in the series, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, continues in that vein with both what has been good and what has been endlessly frustrating about the franchise pumped up to the nth degree. Exciting and moody suspense is tied neatly to well-designed and executed set pieces centered on a stable of IMF agents (who must by now be wondering why bankers keep getting sent to save the world) that has finally gelled after several films worth of experimenting.
It also spends an inordinate amount of time setting up shadowy players with shadowy plans which obfuscate both hero and villain as it largely sticks to the formula laid down by the earlier films in the franchise, treading very closely the line between tried-and-true and cliché-ridden repetition. Despite more than twenty years on the job, things haven’t gotten any easier for top IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) when blowback from their last mission (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) shutters the agency and sends Hunt on the run from his own government. Again.
He’s not running away but rather towards something, searching for the mysterious group known as the Syndicate, which tried to capture him and which he believes is targeting the Prime Minister of Austria in the latest of a series of clandestine terrorist actions. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher) spends much of Rogue Nation channeling his inner-Hitchcock – which is an excellent match for the type of twisty storytelling Mission: Impossible likes – and together with cinematographer Robert Elswit has created a deliberately-staged and shot film that creates the mood of dread and discomfort suspense needs to flourish, and never more so than the fantastic Turandot sequence.
In order to save the Austrian premiere, Hunt and long-time cohort Benji (Simon Pegg) infiltrate the Vienna Opera where they encounter not one, not two, but three assassins working independently of one another (and a bomb!) and whom they all have to stop… somehow. By turns funny, suspenseful and exhilarating, and making full use of the different characters rather than pinning everything on Cruise’s shoulders, it encapsulates everything great about the series (an admittedly small but potent list).
[The one time the film gets away from that – as Cruise dives into an underground computer vault filled with water – is also the one time a set piece actually brings momentum to a halt as Rogue Nation reaches a level of ridiculousness both visually and in the narrative as the camera spins and swoops almost as fast as the exposition trying to justify why on Earth someone would have an underground computer vault filled with water.]
It also reveals the fractured foundation which continues to prop up the series, as the secretive nature of the plot means we know as little about who the villain (Harris) is and what he wants at the end of the sequence as we did at the beginning. Mission: Impossible has always preferred to keep its villains as cyphers, distant and opaque (if they’re visible at all until the end) in order to keep Hunt and his team groping in the dark as much as they are trying to bamboozle everyone else. Who is Simon Lane? Why is he doing what he’s doing?
By the time it becomes clear, it is very difficult to care partly because of the remove from the audience he has been kept at, but mainly because his appearances consist of generically-villainous acts like pretending to shoot a lead but shooting one of the guards standing behind them instead, showcasing little beyond how unwilling the narrative — theoretically built around misdirection — is to engage in actual surprise. This worked fine on television where it’s more important for a procedural to get its 25 episodes out than nearly anything else, but in a film series — particularly one entering its fifth iteration — it creates a hollow world of interchangeable characters running around doing exciting things but with no one quite sure why, or why they should care.
It’s not just the film that keeps taking two steps back for every step forward; Ethan is in very much the same position as he tries to hunt down the mysterious Lane, gathering the rest of his few remaining friends from IMF to steal a computer file from an unbreachable vault with which he can destroy the Syndicate forever. Realizing on some level that movie stars and plot hooks may bring an audience to a film but characters are usually why they stay, McQuarrie and the rest of the brain trust behind the series have recognized that Cruise benefits from having a strong ensemble around him.
While Rogue Nation sticks slavishly to its overall formula (there’s a mission which goes wrong in the first set piece which forces Hunt to go on the run from his own agency and the only way out is an impossible heist which puts Hunt on a collision course for the villain and the film’s final set piece), McQuarrie does take the opportunity to play around with its pieces, from turning the tables on the iconic mission briefing to various switcheroos in the supporting players, putting them in new situations and forcing both characters and actors to stretch.
Pegg in particular benefits from this, becoming Hunt’s permanent sidekick while Jeremy Renner’s Brandt is forced into the support role, sharing most of his scenes with Alec Baldwin’s CIA Director Hunley, trying to thwart the agency’s manhunt for Ethan from the inside. Though Pegg makes the most of his enhanced screentime and provides many of the films best line readings, he is not quite the foil for Cruise that Renner was which is made apparent by how easily Renner steals every scene he’s in, particularly his incredibly dry interrogations by Congress. To be fair, some of that loss is to make room for Rebecca Ferguson’s disavowed MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust and it’s worth it as for the first time series has a leading lady it completely understands and knows what to do with.
Proving herself repeatedly Ethan’s match and more, she is every bit the foil Renner was; combining the disparate elements of both the Girl Friday and the Femme Fatale, she forces Ethan to face his own limits and the possibility he has met an adversary he can’t beat, while his own team must decide if he has finally gone too far. All of Cruise’s best moments are opposite Ferguson as a pair of equals each necessary to the story (unlike Paula Patton’s unfortunate Jane) with sexual tension left a subtext rather than a raison d’etre (a la Thandie Newton’s Nyah), Hunt’s ill-conceived suburban wife (Michelle Monaghan) a distant memory.
In fact, Ilsa is arguably more necessary to Rogue Nation than Hunt is as she is the individual in both primary jeopardy and with an actual relationship to the antagonist, which leaves Hunt as much a mystery as Lane. The character has never been well defined, in part because he is redefined in every film, a chimera reshaped to fit a given story as each new director tries to give the series a different feel, leaving little underneath except a generic good guy who stops bad guys because they are bad. He is a cypher, short hand for ‘Tom Cruise in a Mission: Impossible film’ which is a little forgivable in a first film but harder to overlook five movies in.
The simple solution McQuarrie has come up with is to let the other actors carry the weight of the humor and the drama while Cruise stands around watching and waiting for the next death-defying stunt to be done. Which may make individual scenes play better, but it puts Hunt at a remove from the audience, making him difficult to empathize with, a problem not helped by the decision to continually put him on the run from his own people. As with his motivation it’s a choice which works initially to raise stakes and induce drama but after a while just becomes the expected modus operandi and one that requires increasingly convoluted storytelling to make believable.
Though the strong sense of mood (the twin brother of misdirection) and engaging action sequences make for a successful bit of escapist entertainment, its inability to face endemic problems of the series (and a lack of desire to really dig into its foundation beyond surface scratching) keep Rogue Nation from being all it could have been. The thing is, for misdirection to really work, somewhere under all the layers of false starts and red herrings there must be an immovable base, a core around which everything else is built.
Cruise and his migratory group of cohorts have experimented with several different versions of that core and with each iteration they seem to get closer to the platonic ideal of a Mission: Impossible film, but they’re still too focused on smoke and mirrors to make that final leap. As enjoyable as Rogue Nation is, and it ranks up there with Ghost Protocol and the first Mission: Impossible as one of the better entrants into the series, it also creates the disturbing impression that not only has the franchise still not bothered to figure out what its core is, it’s beginning to look as if there might not be anything there at all.
