Photo credit: Christian Black
I’m not sure M:I Rogue Nation is better than Ghost Protocol (which was pretty amazing) but it is certainly its equal.
We join the Impossible Missions Force team as Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is attempting to gain entry to a humungous Russian cargo plane in order to prevent ‘the package’ from being delivered. Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) is frantically trying to hack the plane’s door – succeeding in first opening the plane’s loading ramp, leaving Hunt hanging from the personnel entrance by his fingers (the stunt that’s been all over the internet).
While this is going on, CIA Director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) and IMF agent William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) are in a Congressional hearing where Hunley is trying to have the IMF disavowed – successfully – because of Hunt’s insistence on, and pursuit of, a shadowy freelance espionage organization known as The Syndicate. Unfortunately, Hunt is right – and trapped by the Syndicate even as the hearing concludes.
He escapes only because of the intervention of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, The White Queen) – but she stays behind to face Syndicate boss Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). For the rest of the movie, we’re never quite sure if she’s on the side of good guys or the forces of the ungodly.
Rebecca Ferguson plays Ilsa in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation from Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions
Despite Hunley’s best efforts (‘This is Hunt’s last day of freedom,’ he states before the film jumps six months), Hunt remains elusive – largely because he’s just that good, but also partly because Benji provides help from within the bowels of Langley (passing weekly polygraph interrogations when not helping Hunt or playing video games).
Once the CIA finds one of Hunt’s boltholes, they movie in – he’s not there, of course – to find a wealth of material on the syndicate which Hunley incorrectly interprets as something else entirely; leaving Benji, Luther Strickell (Ving Rhames) and Brandt to figure it out and help Hunt save the day.
Rogue Nation is a complex machine – filled with plot twists, character shifts and a truly epic Bond-like villain who has a big ticket target (the Prime Minister of England) that will leave him free to gather billions of pounds in funding to change the world as he sees fit.
Simon Pegg plays Benji in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation from Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions
In between beautifully designed and executed action set pieces, we get some extremely good character bits and, in a first for the franchise, a female character who is more than Hunt’s match in every regard. We also get more Simon Pegg than in previous entries – which is good because Pegg can handle dramatic and melodramatic moments with the best of them while providing much of the M:I specific humor.
Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust is a genuine femme fatale. She’s smart, athletic, resilient and tough. Ferguson gives her presence sufficient enough to make one wonder why she’s not the lead character in a franchise of her own.
Harris’ Lane feels like a more physically capable Ernst Starvo Blofeld (you can easily imagine him saying, ‘I expect you to DIE, Mr. Hunt!’) – if played with enough British reserve to make his menace even more chilling.
Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie takes the kind of whip smart inventiveness he provided for The Usual Suspects and ramps it up to the eleven that is necessary for a big time summer tentpole; then directs it with a lovely balance between extreme and subtle. The result is a refreshing action movie that lives up to expectations (and let me tell you, they were high!).
Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation is scintillating summer fun.
Final Grade: A+
Photos courtesy of Paramount Pictures