MOVIE REVIEW
“Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation”
Grade: B+
Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie.
Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, and brief partial nudity. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 11 minutes.
Bottom line: The most satisfying of the series so far
With the new “Mission: Impossible” movie, even if it’s the most assured and satisfying of the five so far, it sounds foolish to even mention the things the characters say in between screeching tires, gunfights, knife fights, motorcycle derring-do, and the opening act featuring Tom Cruise dangling for real (real enough to make it look cool, and frightening) on the outside of a plane high over a Belarus airstrip.
But it isn’t foolish. One of the many pleasures of “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” is the snap and tension of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s dialogue. At one point a character describes Cruise’s Ethan Hunt as an unstoppable force of destiny in such wittily florid terms, it’s like a love letter crossed with a term paper, dropped into a spy movie.
McQuarrie won an Oscar for the highly verbal ensemble foray “The Usual Suspects.” Then, for a long while, his Hollywood career cooled. Now it’s hot again. As a storyteller McQuarrie is smart enough to treat each character as the smartest person in any given room, in his or her own way. Even the disposable goons in “Rogue Nation” are rewarded with a line or two betraying some verifiable human intelligence before they get scissor-kicked in the face.
McQuarrie has a mind, and an eye, for intricate set-ups, and if the results aren’t quite in the realm of movie heaven (the editing by Eddie Hamilton sometimes devolves into chaos), neither do they settle for generic head-bashing.
The super-secret espionage agency known as the Impossible Mission Force becomes de-funded in “Rogue Nation” by the grumpy, competitive C.I.A. director played by Alec Baldwin, lightening the load with extraordinarily dry line readings. This leaves Hunt and the gang without the leeway they need to capture the vicious head of an international terrorist syndicate known, expediently, as The Syndicate.
Sean Harris, whose vocal intonations suggest a lifetime of cigarettes and helium intake, is genuinely chilling as Hunt’s quarry. The IMF crew, familiar and welcome faces all, includes Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames. Rebecca Ferguson, Swedish-born, makes a formidable addition to the team (sub-group: “frenemy”) in the role of a British spy working every side of every street with her mad fighting skills and inevitable if extremely cautious interest in Cruise’s Hunt.
Cruise clearly has a death wish, judging from how he throws himself into Mission: Improbable stunts every time out. For whatever sick reason, we enjoy seeing our stars in some degree of actual physical peril. Half of “Rogue Nation” belongs to the digital realm of trickery; the other half delivers a more gratifying combination of bodies in space, usually going at each other, along with crosses, double-crosses and settings reminiscent of everything from the 1966-1973 TV show to Hitchcock to Stanley Donen’s “Charade.” As for Lalo Schifrin’s famous 5/4 theme — one of the greatest of all “danger” themes in TV or the movies — well … there’s cool. And then there’s “Theme from Mission: Impossible” cool.
