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I’m going to start this review with a short disclaimer: Tom Cruise is a guilty pleasure of mine. Despite the numerous PR-missteps and the couch-jumping antics of recent times, I generally love his films and performances. Now, he returns to his premier franchise to deliver another dose of adrenaline-packed action that for the vast majority delivers with aplomb.
In cinema circles, Cruise is known for his insistence on performing all of his own stunts, such is his love for the job. He famously fired his insurance company after they refused to cover any possible accidents while filming a scene high atop Dubai’s Burj Khalifa for the last Mission: Impossible film, Ghost Protocol, and it seems every director he teams up with throws in a ridiculous stunt to quench his thirst.
Rogue Nation is no different, with the film bursting into life with the latest jaw-dropping exploit that most of Cruise’s peers would palm off to a double while they put their feet up with a cuppa. But, despite being an unbelievable 53, he shows no signs of slowing down.
Pelting down a runway at full pace (because it wouldn’t be a Tom Cruise film if he wasn’t doing his signature run, either), he jumps onto a plane’s side and clings onto a nook with his fingertips as it takes flight. Thousands of feet higher up, he works his way inside, defeats a bunch of baddies and parachutes out alongside a payload of nerve gas bombs.
And that’s just the first five minutes.
This slick, globe-trotting thriller moves between action scene, political intrigue, character-driven dialogue and light-hearted banter at a clip and with considerable ease.
The plot is surprisingly current and on-the-nose. In an age where Edward Snowden has blown US secrets out of the water, these are dire times for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and the rest of his buddies in the Impossible Missions Force (IMF). The US government has tired of the group’s cavalier brand of espionage and throwing huge sums of money at missions with a low chance of success, so they pull the plug.
Ethan refuses to go gentle into that good night though, as he tracks down the Syndicate, a behind-the-scenes network of ex-secret agents that quietly control world events. It’s a blatant rip-off of SPECTRE from the Bond movies, but what better film series in this genre to emulate?
Faced with a government who believe he’s fabricating the existence of the Syndicate purely so he can get off on risking his life, Ethan enlists his returning team of Brandt (Renner), Benji (Pegg) and newcomer Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) to go rogue themselves and uncover the conspiracy before he’s shut down for good.
What I most love about these films is that they don’t take themselves too seriously. Many of Rogue Nation’s action scenes joyfully dispense with realism and the gadgets are preposterous. Although Bond is still the pinnacle of espionage action films and always will be, the shift to a more serious tone since Daniel Craig took on the mantle has left a slight feeling of longing for the silliness of the past, a hole which Mission: Impossible is happy to fill in.
Director Chris McQuarrie takes great delight in throwing out all the espionage fantasy tropes, from double agents, lavish opera scenes, shady meetings on train platforms and graveyards to witty one-liners, it’s a delightful package backed up by a solid cast who have great chemistry with each other.
There’s a couple of niggles, though. The series has always been fairly loose on continuity, with each film being a standalone with a couple of strands of connecting tissue, but the end of Ghost Protocol saw the makings of a solid team ready to take up their next mission (with the Syndicate themselves name-dropped).
Yet here, the female member is once again dispensed with and fails to return, replaced without even a footnote. Furthermore, the team which gelled so well and had fairly equal screen time in the last instalment are relegated to bit-parts aside from Pegg, who always crops up for comic relief or to open a door for Ethan via his laptop.
Yes, Cruise is the film’s star and should be the focus, but McQuarrie could have balanced the cast a bit more deftly like his predecessor.
A couple of plot beats also fail to sparkle. The intrigue around whether the Syndicate exists or not doesn’t really work because you know it does, otherwise the film wouldn’t exist, and you know Ethan will find them otherwise the plot would be pointless. The figurehead also turns out to be fairly cookie-cutter with sketchy motivations.
Despite these small flaws though, Rogue Nation is a fantastic action film with another standout performance from Cruise, whose ridiculous stunt work provides thrills and spills that are a throwback to a time when this genre was more light-hearted.
