Directed and written by: Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Jeremy Renner
The draw of the Mission Impossible movies is that you watch them to see Tom Cruise pull off ridiculous stunts. The stunts are real, and the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Wrong TV series. The film opens up with Ethan Hunt hanging off the side of a plane as it takes off, and then keeps upping the ante with one meticulously put together action set piece after another. Ethan has been after a group called 'The Syndicate'. They're an anti-IMF (impossible mission force). Meanwhile the IMF is shut down because Alec Baldwin as head of the CIA thinks that Ethan has made up The Syndicate to excuse his reckless behaviour. Can Ethan uncover and stop The Syndicate while keeping one step in front of the CIA, and why do both sides keep giving Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) so many second chances?
I'll be interchanging the names of the characters with the names of the actors that play them. As stated above, I'm here to watch Tom Cruise pull off ridiculous stunts while Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, and Ving Rhames support him. The highlight of Rogue Nation is the opera sequence. There's an assassination planned. There are three shooters to make sure the job gets done. The hit is going to be masked by a crescendo in the opera, and the use of the set, the editing, and music are used to not only increase tension, but so we know exactly where every player is and wonder how such a plan is going to be thwarted. Ethan's decision, and how it later ends up not mattering doesn't lessen the sequence in any way. It was the stand out of the entire film for me.
It's also rather early on, yet the action sequences that follow aren't diminished for not living up to it. The true impossible mission in Casablanca works because of the ridiculous technology, and timing required to pull it off. I will admit I rolled my eyes when Ethan was about to insert the chip into the computer that would allow Simon Pegg access to the facility, and then a rotating winch clocks him in the stomach, causing him to drop the chip. I was disgusted with what I felt was the artificiality of causing a hiccup in the plan.
The final sequence almost rises to the brilliance of the opera but in a different way. The opera was a lot of moving pieces that we were able to follow. The ending is a classic "how are they going to get out of this" scenario. Sitting down at a table in a crowded restaurant with a bomb strapped to Benji, Lane (Sean Harris, the leader of The Syndicate) tells Ethan that he foresaw this ending from the moment he trapped Ethan in the record shop at the start of the movie. It becomes about motivation and character behaviour. Ethan as our hero is so much better than Lane. His outmaneuvering allows defusion of the literal ticking time bomb. They escape, Ilsa has a brutal knife fight, and Ethan traps Lane in a box. I don't understand why at this point Lane wanted to kill Ethan rather than capturing him because of the information in his head, but it was a satisfying conclusion nonetheless.
Personal enjoyment: ★★★★
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