Manifest Destiny

Rating: 9/10 (6 August 2015)

The fifth film in a franchise no one would have ever expected to have such trajectory, Rogue Nation actually manages to accomplish the impossible: in the thick of a tension-building chase scene, music pounding, punches crunching, glass shattering, director Christopher McQuarrie holds a moment of silence. Actual silence. And sustains it. It feels like an eternity. It allows the viewer to reflect on how much their ears are ringing, and stretches the tension from engaging to nearly unbearable. And it is beautiful.
This, amazingly, isn't even the most suspenseful moment in the film, which opens with a setpiece involving Tom Cruise actually hanging out of a plane, and gets wilder from there on. But it's perfectly indicative of McQuarrie's confidence waltzing into a franchise and making it his own. For decades, Mission: Impossible has been toying with tone, flirting with 'Bond-but- not-Bond', but without being too vanilla in asserting what it isn't. But, just as the post- millennial Bond has slunk into surly Jason Bourne territory, Ethan Hunt is finally allowed to be fun for fun's sake. And it is phenomenally cathartic.
Fun should not be mistaken for levity, however. McQuarrie brings with him plenty of the burly intensity of his last Cruisefest, Jack Reacher, and sets the tone to 'bludgeon'. And not just in terms of the series' most shockingly intense violence, with clipped, brutally efficient fight scenes punctuated with sound editing like thunderclaps erupting out of nowhere. No shaky-cam or intensified continuity nonsense here. No fuss. No – the real bludgeoning is of the viewer's nerves, racking up setpiece after setpiece of unbelievable tension, all the moreso upon realization of how much death-defying was done entirely practically. You can practically hear McQuarrie shrug, saying, "It was just easier to actually do it than mess around on some computer," but the effect is palpable. From a rafters opera knife fight involving three(!) snipers, synched to the orchestral score dizzyingly enough to make Alfred Hitchcock sweat, to an almost overwhelmingly claustrophobic sequence of Cruise outdoing the 'switch the computer chip' climax of Captain America: The Winter Soldier while free-diving in a revolving, pressurized water tank, to a backwards-car-chase-turned-motorcycle-chase-turned- ANOTHER-motorcycle-chase (in which Cruise is literally inches from disfigurement the entire time), M:I5 is a psychotic roller-coaster of thrills. And it barely seems to try.
It's almost disconcerting, in fact, how nonchalantly airtight the film feels. The pacing, script, and cinematography are slick but unshowy, allowing moments of humour to breathe without feeling like obligatory punch-ups (promoting the infallibly wonderful Simon Pegg to primary scene partner here is a genius move), and shearing the plot down to a razor-fine intensity. Yes, the script is overly prone to worming in trailer sting lines like "this is never going to work" or "this is our last chance" in virtually every scene, but if ya gotta do it, may as well leave them in the capable hands of Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, and Jeremy "the human frown" Renner, who, vaguely bored as they might seem, can each sell a scene or punchline alike in their sleep. For such a previously vaguely defined franchise, it's oddly fun and satisfying to see the whole IMF gang cavorting around together, and have it actually feel like 'the boys are back in town'. Even composer Joe Kraemer finds yet another thrilling way of remixing that iconic musical theme that could carry the franchise by itself. It all just seems to fit.
This, if anything, is the film's central theme. In a vintage Baldwinian monologue, Alec Baldwin's CIA sourpuss refers to Hunt as "the manifestation of destiny", and it's a curiously resonant statement. Just when the film's central conceit of 'disbarred agent hunting down shadow organization to prevent global conspiracy' starts to feel a little too familiar (your turn at bat, Spectre), McQuarrie takes the sting out with an odd bent of fatalism. Here, the hero/villain dichotomy is taken to a genuinely interesting place: both rely on each other's competency to achieve their own goals, assuming no endeavour the other undertakes could fail. Their plans each systematically work because of course they do, and the perennial piggybacking of schemes is strangely thrilling. Here, Sean Harris is the perfect antagonist, in that he, unlike virtually all fellow moustache-twirlers, feels and acts like a real spy: quiet, polite, sans showboating, with only the tiniest nasal flares connoting volumes of seething villainy.
It's also a rare treat to have a femme fatale figure who is genuinely hard to read or predict, but, in doing so, Rebecca Fergusson snatches the film's most impressively compelling performance, just as breezily likable as astoundingly capable in combat, complete with the most surprisingly tender cinematic hug in years, of all things. Ultimately, however, the franchise is still unapologetically a Tom Cruise vehicle, and he makes it count. Performing more jaw-dropping stunts than he has lines in the film, and wordlessly reacting to histrionic situations with the smallest of bemused head tilts like a 1000 watt Cary Grant, the 53 year old Cruise is still every inch the movie star, and it is just as thrilling as ever to see him in his element.
It's rare to see a sequel, let alone a 'part 5', not only exceed its predecessors but casually cement its tone as a franchise, while casually delivering the most exciting and thrilling romp of the year thus far, but Cruise and McQuarrie have here accomplished the Imposserr, Improbable. The rather appropriate moniker for the now eagerly awaited next installment? MI6. Your move, Mr. Bond.
-9/10