Top-Notch Action Yarn

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2015)

The latest installment in the "Mission: Impossible" film franchise ranks as one of the best. "Jack Reacher" director Christopher McQuarrie's "Mission: Impossible--Rogue Nation" rivals its superlative predecessor "Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol" with spine-tingling suspense and spectacularly staged set-pieces. Mind you, things haven't always been so good. The initial "Mission: Impossible" movie was arguably exciting enough in its own right, especially when Tom Cruise suspended himself Spider-man style at CIA Headquarters. Nevertheless, the film portrayed one of the most beloved television series characters in such a sacrilegious light that most television "Mission: Impossible" fanatics abhorred it. I grew up watching Peter Graves play Jim Phelps from 1967 to 1973 and again briefly from 1988 to 1990 on the weekly, hour-long, CBS-TV program, and the heretical notion that Phelps could turn traitor constituted blasphemy. Little did it matter that the people who produced "Mission: Impossible" gave Phelps legitimate grounds for his treachery. Comparably, this would be tantamount to turning either Marshal Dillon of "Gunsmoke" into a murderous outlaw or indicting Andy Griffith's Sheriff Andy Taylor for police brutality.
The second entry in the Paramount franchise "Mission Impossible II" emerged as a vast improvement over the original. Unfortunately, the stimulating third installment "Mission Impossible III" made an error almost as egregious as defaming Jim Phelps. Tom Cruise and director J.J. Abrams gave Ethan Hunt a wife to worry about, and that matrimonial madness provided the motive force in its contrived melodrama. The secret agent with a double life and a wife is the stuff of spoofs, and the marriage plot was predictable. Perhaps if they had substituted Hunt's parents (remember them from the 1996 original?) for his wife, the idea might have been more palatable. As swiftly as the franchise got Ethan hitched, it got him just as quickly unhitched with ambiguous details. "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" kept Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) separated from his wife, and he reverted to single status as he had in "Mission Impossible II." Happily, neither Cruise nor his latest collaborators have pulled anything as foolhardy as "Mission Impossible III" with "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation."
Like the best James Bond extravaganzas, "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation" opens with a cliffhanger gambit. Ethan Hunt scrambles atop the wing of a military cargo plane, an Airbus A400M, as it trundles down the runaway for take-off. He slaloms off the wing down to the fuselage and seizes the door handle. Hunt's cyber genius colleague Benjamin Dunn (Simon Pegg of "Shaun of the Dead") struggles to open the door remotely while Hunt clings desperately for dear life as the plane gains altitude. Frantically, Benji opens the wrong door, but eventually opens the right door. Hunt gains access to the cargo hold and spots the pallet of VX-nerve gas missiles. The villains, a band of Chechen separatist fighters, discover Hunt's presence too late, and he deploys the chute on the pallet, so both the missiles and he plunge into the blue. This snappy incident is peripheral to the plot, but it gets this outlandish escapade off on the right foot. Moreover, this tense scene reunites Hunt with not only Benji, but also series regular Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames of "Pulp Fiction") and "Ghost Protocol" addition William Brandt (Jeremy Renner of "The Bourne Legacy").
This time around our heroic quartet wrestles with their worst nightmare: the Syndicate, an enigmatic league of terrorists, alluded to at the end of "Ghost Protocol," that threatens not only to destroy the IMF but also initiate global chaos. Predictably, of course, we know Hunt and company will preserve the status quo. Nevertheless, writer & director Christopher McQuarrie takes everything straight to the brink and then lets it teeter. Earlier "Mission Impossible" movies relied on the plot device of 'disavowing' Ethan Hunt so he wound up as the man in the middle between the good guys and the bad guys. "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation" raises the stakes considerably by ostracizing the entire IMF Agency, with bureaucratic, stuffed-shirt CIA Director Alan Hunley (Alex Baldwin of "The Hunt for Red October") arguing passionately for the IMF's dissolution after the infamous San Francisco incident involving a Russian nuclear missile. Meantime, in London, Hunt stumbles accidentally onto the Syndicate. This shadowy organization consists of thousands of spies who have deserted and are officially listed as dead. Pretty but pugnacious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson of "The White Queen"), an undercover British Intelligence agent who follows orders from Syndicate honcho Solomon Kane (Sean Harris of "Prometheus") acts as if she is a double agent.
"Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation" delivers everything that we've come to expect from this intrigue-laden, gadget- encumbered franchise. Our resourceful heroes still wear those latex masks that they peel off at dramatic moments to surprise us. As usual, they are required to break into and out of various buildings bristling with sophisticated security safeguards that sometimes challenge them to the point of death. The debonair 53-year old Cruise performs his own perilous stunts, virtually all of them hair-raising, acrobatic accomplishments. He careens a small car around in a maze of narrow city streets with the villains in hot pursuit and then launches himself astride a motorcycle with daredevil gusto. Director Christopher McQuarrie succeeds at making everything doubly difficult for our protagonists, and they embark on an improbable but death-defying gauntlet of obstacles that would stymie lesser souls. Several scenes benefit from gripping tension because one set of heroes execute tasks that prevent another hero from either being captured or killed. Cruise and co-star Rebecca Ferguson team up in several helter-skelter, close quarters, combat scenes that surely required lots of rehearsal. Ferguson displays dazzling dexterity when she clashes with a henchman twice her size who wields a knife far larger than hers. One of the best sequences has Cruise debating which villain to perforate before either assassinates a foreign dignitary during a live opera performance. The fifth globe-trotting "Mission Impossible" foray qualifies as a rapid-fire, white-knuckled, adrenaline-laced, nail-biter with momentum that never slackens and surprises that astonish.