ROGUE NATION

Rating: 8/10 (17 March 2019)

The best thing about this movie is Rebecca Ferguson who plays Illsa Faust. She can hold her own in a scene with Tom Cruise and is incredibly beautiful, graceful, mysterious, and charismatic. Regular Cruise Collaborator Chris McQuarrie steps up to the plate to direct this one. He'd go on to helm the sequel FALLOUT. Before this he had written and produced Valkyrie, written Live Die Repeat and Ghost Protocol, and both written and directed Jack Reacher. He is closest in style to either Brad Bird or Brian De Palma. Bird in the way he continues with the same overall style and template that Bird had introduced, and like De Palma in that he is more of a classic kind of a filmmaker similar in many ways to Hitchcock as De Palma was. The movie kicks off and the fuse is lit with a breathtaking airplane stunt and then doesn't let go for the next 80 to 90 minutes. It slows down and gets a little clunky at the 90 minute point but picks up again for a great conclusion. Also Jeremy Renner's performance was a little...goofy at times and he was slightly under utilized. But overall Its one of the better, possibly even the best Mission: Impossible as a whole. The set pieces and action scenes are all memorable, Rebecca Ferguson is a fantastic addition and maybe the best character in the series, the music by Joe Kraemer is very good, better than Lorne Balfe's in Fallout for sure. Tom Cruise kind of screwed up the awesome haircut tradition of the series (switching from short on the odd numbered films to long in the even) in this one and I'm not a huge fan of his decision to sport a haircut that's basically neither. Kind of on the longer side, but who really cares. I notice this is a Mission I come back to almost more than any of the others. Its got a great style, tone, and its a lot of fun.