Film review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

Dir: Christopher McQuarrie

With: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg

Runtime: 131 minutes

IF English teachers ruled the world there would be a special award due to the Mission: Impossible series for almost single-handedly keeping alive the colon in film titles. While we are in the mood for handing out prizes, Christopher McQuarrie, writer-director of M:I - Rogue Nation deserves a gong for rejuvenating a franchise that should now be in its dotage.

Being the fifth in the series, Rogue Nation is old in dog years (how any film franchise should be dated), but it has the energy of a newly roused pup. While the 131 minutes are not without snoozy stretches, Rogue Nation still jumps and yips and yaps up a storm.

To what should this zest be attributed? Besides McQuarrie, the writer of The Usual Suspects and Edge of Tomorrow, one could look to the stunts and the one man nuclear power plant that is Tom Cruise, or the influence of JJ Abrams, who has managed to take time out from some space opera he is working on to produce Rogue Nation.

But what truly gives Rogue Nation the edge is a new face, or more precisely a new female face belonging to Rebecca Ferguson. Besides her face, Ms Ferguson’s character, a brilliant agent by the name of Ilsa Faust, has another unique selling point, this one involving her legs. (You didn’t really think a heroine in a summer blockbuster was going to get by on brains alone?)

When McQuarrie opens proceedings the IMF (Impossible Missions Force, not to be confused with any other IMF in the news lately), is out in the field, engaged in business as usual. Benji the geek (Simon Pegg) is hitting buttons on a computer, Luther the ever practical (Ving Rhames) is problem solving, while super agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is getting ready to engage in some action that contravenes every health and safety ruling known to humankind.

But all is not well with the IMF, and no, it is nothing to do with the debt levels of a certain southern European nation. The CIA, in the shape of Alec Baldwin in alpha silver fox mode, is gunning for the organisation and wants it shut down. And all of this just when it seems that the IMF’s arch enemy, the shadowy Syndicate, really does exist and is functioning as rogue nation, wreaking terrorist havoc around the world.

So far, so boys and their toys. It comes as some relief, therefore, to welcome the enigmatic Ilsa into the mix. Courtesy of several blistering set pieces, Ilsa is seen to be the equal of Hunt when it comes to death defying and gravity mocking exploits. In what is a spectacular concession to common sense, as well as demonstrating the film’s sly sense of humour, she even gets to take her heels off now and then. Don’t get too excited, though. Feminism will only have truly arrived in action movie land when the heroine sports a nice pair of Clarks, but for now it will do. Ilsa’s other calling card is a complicated, Strictly Come Dancing-style trick with her legs which one would like to see Bond try sometime.

Ilsa’s identity and her true mission is the guessing game that keeps the movie going between what audiences have really come to see - the stunts. From Hunt rewriting the rules of air travel to a rubber-dissolving car and motorbike chase, McQuarrie and his team do not disappoint. And there is the usual blizzard of international datelines as the action zips from Minsk to Marrakech, Vienna to London, checking out the sights as it goes.

While the action impresses, the dialogue wavers from clunky (“Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny”. Come again?), to flabby, the latter occurring when McQuarrie unwisely attempts to explain the plot. From Bruce Geller’s original television series in the Sixties onwards, the point of Mission: Impossible is that the plots are best left unexplained. It is enough that the mission is declared impossible at the outset. All the rest is for show and it is quite the spectacle Cruise and company stage.