Hunt and the Syndicate

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2015)

Its 19 years since the first Mission Impossible movie and Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt is no longer fresh faced he once was.
Now in its fifth instalment Rogue Nation is not as portentous as MI:2 and like the Bond franchise Cruise as Producer knows what makes his MI films tick. The downside is we have lost the individual elements that directors like Brian De Palma and John Woo brought in the earlier films.
Rogue Nation sees IMF agent Ethan Hunt going after a shadowy criminal organization known as the Syndicate who in a turnaround catch him and he escapes with the help of a Syndicate member Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson.) The IMF have now been disbanded thanks to the CIA Director played by Alec Baldwin and the rest of the team Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames go on a globe trotting pursuit to try to outsmart the Syndicate and be one step ahead of the CIA.
Like the fourth instalment with its landmark set piece of Cruise climbing the Burj Khalifa this one sees Cruise hanging on a plane. I presume he was aided by being on wires that was later digitally removed rather just hanging on with his hands as the plane took off for his own insurer's sake.
There is a nice opera set piece set in Austria but it did remind me of something similar done by Bond in Quantum of Solace a few years earlier as well as the opera backdrop being an important element for the climax of The Godfather III.
More novel was the set piece in Casablanca as Hunt dives underwater to change a profile key so Pegg can gain access to a digital safe. However writer/director Christopher McQuarrie surely missed a trick by not recycling lines from the film Casablanca. Not even a 'round up the usual suspects' dialogue somewhere!
Pegg again provides the comic relief, Renner and Rhames get to spar with each other as they meet for the first time in this movie. Ferguson is efficient enough as the mischievous spy being used by the Syndicate and MI5. The film also reunites the cast of the BBC comedy Rev with Simon McBurney playing the Intelligence Head and Tom Hollander playing the British Prime Minister.
Sean Harris is chilling enough as the villainous Solomon Lane but the MI films never seem to have had memorable villains apart from the first one which was for all the wrong reasons given how they urinated over a much loved character from the original television series.
This is a solid and enjoyable continuation of a film series admired by critics and the public. However I do think for the sixth film Cruise needs to hire a director who might inject some quirky individuality.