Not quite the best but great fun

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2015)

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV has had a remarkable cinematic career which began 34 years ago and, after no less than 38 movies, is as strong as ever. At the very core of his success is the "Mission: Impossible": franchise which has now been running for almost two decades. Except for the sequence where he breaks into the CIA's Headquarters, I was not massively impressively by the first film, but the second and third outings were much better and the fourth was terrific. Last time, we had Cruise - who famously does his own stunts - hanging from the Burj Klaifa, the tallest skyscraper in the world, and I guess nothing was going to top that. So "M:I 5" is (perhaps inevitably) a bit of a disappointment but still cracking good entertainment.
Cruise still has star quality and still looks good at 52 (when he shot the film) and Simon Pegg as Benji has an important support role. Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames, as the other members of the IMF team, do not have much to do. Sean Harris is not a particularly scary villain, while Tom Hollander looks plain silly as the British Prime Minister. The casting revelation of the movie is the half British, half Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson who did her own stunts and is the strongest female character in any "M:I" film. Every film in the franchise has had a different director but this time Christopher McQuarrie is responsible for both direction and screenplay.
As usual, the plotting is somewhat chaotic and utterly implausible. The main problem though is that, fifth time round, we seems to have seen so much of it before and indeed there are deliberate allusions to all the previous four movies. So we are back in London (although there seems to be ubiquitous fog which hasn't been the case for 50 years); we have a another list on a memory stick (although nobody seems to use them any more); we have another impossible break-in (which manages to be possible); and there is even an (unexplained) appearance of the rabbit's foot (where were the white doves?). But, heh, it's still so much fun.