Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation review – functional old-school action thriller

The increasingly stately Tom Cruise/Mission: Impossible action-adventure franchise is now almost 20 years old. It has employed as directors Brian De Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams, Brad Bird and now Christopher McQuarrie – and got through female leads including Emmanuelle Béart, Thandie Newton and Michelle Monaghan. During its existence, the competing Bourne franchise with Matt Damon has come and gone. But M:I just continues, and so does its star Tom Cruise – now 53 years old, but buff of bod and tight of ab and looking hardly older now than when he started in the series, which gave him a turbocharged boost as an A-list star in an era when such creatures were thought to be becoming extinct. Now he’s even developing Jack Reacher on the side as well. I remember when his little-fancied action caper Knight and Day came out in 2010, thinking that this could be Tom Cruise’s last hurrah as an action hero. How very wrong.

So Cruise is back for this fifth entry, which has been made possible by a hefty influx of new investment from Chinese producers Alibaba Pictures, resulting I suspect in the film’s touristy and sentimental interest in James Bond/Harry Potter-style locations in London, where characters make secret calls from fully functioning red telephone boxes. There seems to be a distinct old-school respect for Great Britain generally. The story treats the idea of assassinating the Austrian chancellor as almost laughably less important than whacking the British prime minister.

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Alibaba’s money probably mostly went on insurance costs for Cruise, as he is again doing those rash non-greenscreen (though presumably safety-harnessed) stunts that he has made his signature, as well as indulging his enduring passion for unhelmeted motorbiking. He rides at G-force-pulling speed, leaning over recklessly at corners, speedway-style, with his knee more or less grazing the tarmac.

In M:I4 we saw some gasp-inducing routines involving a very high building in Dubai; here Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has some enjoyably silly derring-do on a plane, grabbing the door and hanging on for dear life as the thing takes off. Meanwhile, his comrades in top-secret outfit the IMF – the franchise has, incidentally, never to my knowledge done financial jokes – remain at ground level: tough, stolid Brandt (Jeremy Renner), super-cool Luther (Ving Rhames) and wacky Benji (Simon Pegg), the colleague with whom Ethan is very much bezzies. Ethan doesn’t have anywhere near the same relationship with anyone else, and Pegg’s character and performance is interestingly less goofy and absurd: closer to being a straight supporting player.

So what of the title: rogue nation? Could this mean something topical, like Islamic State? Not exactly. In this age of transparency and responsibility, the IMF is in bad odour in milksop political circles, and the grumpy CIA chief Hunley (Alec Baldwin) is calling for the unit to be disbanded. It is at this point that they are attacked, as it were, from the inside, by an outfit calling itself The Syndicate, run by a creepy and very Bond-ish villian called Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). But Ethan finds that Solomon’s bikini-wearing helpmeet Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) – beautiful and deadly in the accepted fashion – appears to be on his side. Or is she?

The central plot plank of M:I5 is that the good guys have been cut loose from the established governmental setup, and perhaps even betrayed by them, and must go it alone. But this of course is the driving plot mechanism of pretty much all the Mission: Impossible films. There is no change here, no updating or re-imagining for the 21st century. The movies could be happening in almost any decade, and in fact there’s rather less emphasis on the overtly techie stuff, which in earlier M:I films had Tom hanging from thin wires and tapping away at laptops in mid-air.

It’s really just a chain of colossal action sequences that could be shown in any order. Looking back over the franchise, my reactions have ranged from enjoyment to defeated exasperation and back again. There’s not a lot to chew on in McQuarrie’s script here; I have happy memories of Anthony Hopkins’s sarcastic drawl in M:I2: “It’s not Mission: Difficult is it?” This M:I is entertaining in its schematic way; it’s impossible not to respond to the theme music on a Pavlovian level. There’s a sentimental attachment. But like Tom in that almighty opening plane stunt, I’m finding it harder and harder to hang on.