There’s nothing better than when you start watching a new movie and you realize that all of the big moments from its advertising are going to be taken care of within the first five minutes of its opening. Too often movie trailers give away the entire plot of the film, or at least all of the big, spectacular moments, in an effort to ensure that they capture as many potential customers’ interests as possible. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is one of the movies that’s confident enough in itself to fill its ads with mostly stuff that happens in the first five minutes, and then to let what’s left come as a surprise. Its confidence is not misplaced either, because this fifth Mission: Impossible is not only a really fun summer movie, it’s also one of the best entries in the franchise.
That doesn’t mean as much as it does when you’re talking about most other franchises that get to five installments though, because each Mission: Impossible movie has been made by a different director, and instead of being directed to make their movie as simpatico and cohesive with the others as possible, as is usually the case, each of these directors has clearly been directed to put as much of their own stamp on their work as possible, so your opinion on which ones are good and which ones are bad could very wildly to the opinions of the person next to you. For me, I found the first one to be generally fine, but fairly generic, the second to be wildly bad, the third to be a little short on thrills, but admirable in the way it tried to turn Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) into a more three-dimensional character, the fourth to be a hugely satisfying summer action movie, and this fifth one to line up pretty well with the fourth. It kind of feels like, despite the fact that each new director is likely to keep putting their stamp on future Mission: Impossible movies, that this could be a franchise that’s managed to find a voice anyway.
This time around Cruise is being directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who was able to produce really fun action stuff when they worked together on the underappreciated Jack Reacher, so it should come as no surprise that the extra money and extra studio support they got due to working together on an established franchise like this has led to them creating action stuff that’s even more exciting than what we got there. Ghost Protocol worked so well that it kind of felt like Brad Bird should become the all-time director of Mission: Impossible movies, even though that would go against tradition, but McQuarrie’s work here has more than proven that giving each installment to a new filmmaker is still a worthy experiment.
Rogue Nation is very much one of those action movies that’s all about its big set pieces, with the story existing as just a flimsy framework used to present them to us, so doing too much plot summary would be weird. We’ll just say that a bad guy named Lane (Sean Harris) has put together a new terrorist group at odds with IMF, Hunt and his usual crew of supporters want to hunt him down and stop him, a big wig in the CIA (Alec Baldwin) has made their task harder by lobbying the government to shut down and defund IMF, and a British operative named Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is caught between all parties. She’s the best part of the movie. When spies meet in most spy movies, they usually talk about shared past experiences and all of the various double-crosses they’ve pulled on each other, and the meeting of Hunt and Faust feels like, for maybe the first time ever, we’re actually living through all of those old war stories alongside them.
The thing that makes Rogue Nation work is that the set pieces rule, and there are so many of them that the scenes that come in between have to be short and purposeful. The pacing of this movie really cooks, and the action scenes are huge in scope and full of so much ticking clock tension that they deliver in a major way, so it’s pretty impossible not to have fun the whole time you’re watching it. The scene where Hunt hangs off the side of a plane that’s taking off early on is thrilling, a knife fight that happens at an opera later on is beautiful in the way that the music seems to perfectly accompany the choreography of the violence, and a car/motorcycle chase scene that happens after that involves so many intersecting parties and gets so crazy as it goes on for so long that it’s likely the best chase scene that’s happened in years.
While McQuarrie’s writing is pretty smart about including only the things that matter in a movie like this, that doesn’t mean that his approach doesn’t come with a downside. There are too many coincidences in this film. Things the characters couldn’t have planned are said to be plans. The planning and equipment they need to pull off heists magically appears, even though the have no resources and limited time, with zero explanation. If a movie isn’t working, holes like these can really sink it. If a movie keeps a quick pace and everything it’s giving you is entertaining, you don’t even think about things like this as you’re watching it though. Rogue Nation is the sort of movie that’s exciting enough and rich enough in what it gives you that you don’t ever find yourself needing to stop and think about it. It’s not that you have to turn your brain off, it’s just that your brain is already occupied with enough good stuff.
As far as the acting goes, Rogue Nation is solid, but you’ve probably come to expect that from a Mission: Impossible movie. Cruise and the other cast members who have returned (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner) are pretty much just performing as their movie star personas, so they’re simply doing what works for them, but what works for them really works for them, and it’s not like anyone here is sleepwalking or anything. Everybody is working hard, but working hard in their comfort zones, so the results are performances that are strong and comfortable, like snuggling yourself in a warm acting blanket.
The real story of the film is Ferguson. She steals the whole movie, has the potential to be a huge star, and is going to be introduced to a whole lot of new people by getting a role so big in a movie this high profile, so there can only be even better things in her future. She has a beauty that’s warm and inviting, but equal to the kind of leading lady beauty that can often be stunning but cold. She’s at the same time entrancing and inviting, and she’s killer at keeping up with a physical actor like Tom Cruise on the action side of things. Rogue Nation probably did enough as a fun action movie and a worthy entrant in a larger franchise to be remembered, but it using Ferguson so well pretty much guarantees that people will be re-watching it for years.
