more twists than a pretzel factory, but it's all about the set pieces

Rating: 7/10 (31 July 2015)

One of the things that writer/director Christopher McQuarrie knows with his first big leap into a franchise such as M:I is this: sometimes you got to take from the best. Case in point is probably my favorite set piece in this movie - and needless to say, the set pieces are what makes it work ultimately, past the plot, which I may or may not get to later - in an opera house in Vienna. Everyone is seated watching this big opera going on, while Ethan Hunt (good ol' Mr. Cruise) is trying to track down an assassin who he saw in London and may try (or will) take out the Chancellor of Austria. There may be more than one assassin (indeed the entrance of this particular woman spy is as elegant as you'd expect, in a dress walking up a staircase, as one might expect in such a movie, but I digress). And there's another issue, which is that the clock is ticking to one point: the crescendo of a note to 'Tempo' (I think that's it, whatever) when a singer hits such a high point that an assassin can somehow shoot the Chancellor from afar and the performance can keep going on without interruption.
Sound at all familiar? Hitchcock did almost the same sequence - a concert with the note as the tipping point for the killer - in The Man Who Knew Too Much (34 and 56), and I'd best my car and my apartment that McQuarrie's studied Hitchcock like a doctor facing final exams. And yet he makes the sequence his own, making suspenseful moments building at every step, not to mention with Simon Pegg's tech-guy Benji on the laptop, as a fight ensues, the targets get aimed up, and then the fall out to try to escape. There may be moments during this and other times in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation where one credits the logic of how things are unfolding; why there aren't more guards at this opera, for example, or better surveillance or better controls over this and that. But McQuarrie also knows, for the worldwide audience for this kind of movie, your logic has to only take it so far while watching it.
There are MANY things that happen in Rogue Nation, and there are so many plot points and twists and turns - allegiances one questions, motives that are difficult to pin-point, and did I mention logic - that it'd be too much to sum it up in an IMDb comment. All you need to know is: Hunt's group, the IMF (not the International Monetary Fund.. I think, anyway) has been compromised and dismantled, and folded into the CIA (which doesn't seem to do much, don't they have operatives, again, questions I ask now leaving the theater). Now there's a "Syndicate" that is like the Anti-IMF, dismantling major financial organizations, killing leaders, and so on. Only Hunt can face this 'Syndicate' and its head, Lane, a very sinister-ly performed by Sean Harris, who is another in a long line of villains who have cold blood running through veins and minds like reinforced-titanium traps. Or something.
In other words, tension and suspense for the heroes, and another character here, like Renner in the previous movie (Ghost Protocl), who is hard to trust, played by Rebecca Ferguson. There were so many twists and turns in this story, as I said, that it neared the point of ludicrousness. How much can one take not knowing who to trust or what the British really want or who set up what organization? Well, a lot, as it turns out. Though I reached a point in the third act where I thought, "Alright, I give up, I don't know where this is going and it's kind of dumb", I was never really THAT confused, and I have to give credit to McQuarrie and his team for keeping things moving slickly and with a kind of intelligence about the improbability (no, uh, "Impossible"-ity, and the word of the title is literally used in the movie at one point.
An example of that is the set piece involving a free-swim to change an entire hard-drive, under-water, for Pegg to get information for this and that and the other thing. How does this really work out? Does oxygen really work that way? Didn't I see this kind of mission years ago in a Ninja Turtles Nintendo game, with the same 'Oxygen' bar? But, hey, whatever, it's a ride, and just flippin' go with it. Though this will be a blockbuster that has a fairly indestructible hero, the fun really seems to be, after five movies it's more than clear enough, how he doesn't completely break after certain violent and hazardous scenarios. Hell, the movie starts off with the scene everyone sees in the trailer, with Hunt hanging off the side of a plane mid-air, asking with some impatience for Benji to open the door.
So, all in all, McQuarrie paying a kind of Hitchcock-on-steroids tribute with Rogue Nation, with a top shelf cast as always (Alec Baldwin for one) and as far as mindless Hollywood action tent-poles go with delirious chases and death-defying, nearly cartoonish levels of peril, it's better than most. And hey, at the least, the heroine remembers to run without her heels this time. 7.5/10