Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation is a long way away from the super slick tension of the first, brilliant film in the series. While it’s ridiculous in large parts, lacks attention to detail and over blows the action at every opportunity it still manages to be a crowd pleaser. We’re never going to be able to give it a high scoring review, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth catching on the big screen just for the sheer exuberant fun of it all.
The story for the fifth outing in the series is set not too long after Ghost Protocol as Ethan discovers the presence of a rogue anti-IMF agency that is hell bent on disrupting world politics to meet its own hazy view on geo-political righteousness, or something along those lines; it gets a bit woolly around the intentions of The Syndicate for some reason, which kind of adds to their enigmatic status oddly. It makes for a good setup, especially with the another arch brewing in Washington DC where the head of the CIA is lobbying to shut the IMF down due to its unconventional methods.
There’s an element of similarity between The Syndicate and the development of the next James Bond, SPECTRE, but both nefarious orginasations have got their roots in the original storylines from the TV series and books. The fact that Ian Flemming had a hand in the creation of both goes a long way to explain the presence of the two criminal organisations that have become the most sinister threat to world peace outside of the Avengers Universe this year.
However, that’s not entirely where the similarities between the two films ends as there’s clearly an attempt to bring a bit of the James Bond British Intelligence magic to Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. With large parts of the film set in London and a pretty big section with Ethan dressed in a pin sharp suit and trying to stop an assassination in an Austrian opera house you can’t help but suspect that the movie is a manifestation of Tom Cruise (Edge Of Tomorrow) pretending to be 007 just a little.
He doesn’t do a bad job as such in his role as Impossible Mission Force field operative Ethan Hunt, but there are just a few too many glitches in his performance for it to be considered a strong performance. The reality is that Cruise can be a very good actor, but it’s just not strung together well enough for that to be the case here. He’s just a bit too crafted for it to flow naturally and the sheer volume of cheese that’s been written into the script by director Christopher McQuarrie – co-writer of Edge Of Tomorrow – means he had his work cut out for him right from the beginning.
The rest of the cast put in decent enough performances within the confines of the film’s big budget blockbuster intentions with Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson (pictured above) leading the way as double operative Isla Faust. Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner (Avengers: Age Of Ultron) and Simon Pegg (Star Trek Into Darkness) are dependable enough as they return to their roles as Luther Stickell, William Brandt and Benji Dunn and the same can be said for Alec Baldwin as CIA director Alan Hunley, Simon McBurney (The Theory Of Everything) as MI6 director Attlee and Tom Hollander (A Poet in New York) as the British Prime Minister.
Our great hope for the film was it’s lead bad guy and leader of The Syndicate, Solomon Lane, played by Sean Harris, who impressed in ’71 and will soon be starring alongside Michael Fassbender in Macbeth (2015). The bad news though is that he’s just not as menacing as we’d hoped he’d be. He starts out well enough, with a very cold murder and stare, but the moment he opens his mouth and delivers his first crunched larynx infused line he loses you, sounding more like he’s got a bit of a sore throat than anything sinister.
Director and writer Christopher McQuarrie has got the most to answer for, both from a negative and positive side. He’s a big part of the “crowd pleaser” status of the film, for example the fight scenes are pretty impressive, with a lot of intensity and well choreographed exchanges. Some of the setup for this is a little contrived, like the pipe that Hunt is tied to having such a convenient escape route for a well trained operative with athletic skills, but the end delivery looks very cool at times.
On the negative side he manages to miss a lot of detail, which undermines the overall quality of the film. Alec Baldwin’s tie is askew for the first half of the movie, Ethan’s futuristic BMW with hand-print recognition technology doesn’t have bullet proof glass and nobody every shows any signs of being hurt, no matter how bad the fall. Equally, all of the stunts are completely over-the-top, which adds to the rediculous nature of the film. If they’d just been eased off a little with an element of common sense and an understanding of physics they would have had much more impact, instead of just making you chuckle.
All of that said, we still sort of enjoyed Mission Impossible: Rogue Nature, not just in spite of the negatives, but sometimes because of them. We’ll always be disappointed by the fact that the last four films in the series have failed to live up to the potential of the tense opener, but you can’t help but get swept up a little bit by the daft fun, excitement and outlandish action of it all.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation review: 3/5
