Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015, Dir. Christopher McQuarrie):
Those who enjoy subtext in their action flicks will have a field day with the latest entry in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise. While previous M:I films glorified the virility of their leading man (See Tom run! See Tom jump! See Tom dive off skyscrapers!), the cracks are now starting to show. We’re not talking about the cracks in Cruise’s face, of course — at the age of 53, hair tousled and sinewy chest proudly bared, he’s the actor’s equivalent of Peter Pan. Nor are we talking about the cracks in Rogue Nation’s putative plot, which as usual concerns itself with evildoers plotting to take over the world, stolen disks containing vital information, blah blah blah.
No, the true suspense of the movie lies in the frisson where fantasy and reality collide, as the filmmakers (and Cruise) insist on throwing heroic spook Ethan Hunt (Cruise) into can-you-top-this action sequences, like an aging weightlifter attacking his heaviest load yet, and the question nags at us as we watch: Can Cruise keep pulling this off? Nowhere is this more apparent than the film’s glorious opening image of Cruise hanging on for dear life to the side of an airplane, for real. It’s hard to believe that folks were wondering almost a decade ago whether he was getting too old for this shit. At their best, the Mission: Impossible movies are throwbacks to a time when action movies weren’t burdened with realism, and with Jason Bourne and Daniel Craig’s James Bond going dark and heavy, there was a time when it was an open question whether the M:I series could compete. But that was before the fourth (and most successful) M:I film, Ghost Protocol, revitalized the whole concept by throwing Cruise into outlandish predicaments and watching him squirm, much like Wile E. Coyote as the cliff disappears beneath his feet (no surprise that the movie was directed by Brad Bird, of animated Invincibles and Iron Giant fame). Ghost Protocol humanized Cruise just enough, and gave his castmates just enough to do, to prevent the whole enterprise from sliding into a vain tribute to its star — and in the process it emerged as probably the most entertaining action picture of the current decade.
Ghost Protocol‘s approach is adopted for Rogue Nation; sadly, not much else is carried through. The main culprit is writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, who was unable to elevate his previous collaboration with Cruise, Jack Reacher (2012), into something other than a fawning tribute to Cruise-osity. McQuarrie first made a name for himself as the writer of The Usual Suspects (1995), and Rogue Nation‘s script could have benefited from the nimble, cheerful nastiness of that movie; instead we get a lot of guff about shadow organizations and conspiracies that is entirely inconsequential. Like Ghost Protocol, we have action scenes that seem to be spat out of a malfunctioning Rube Goldberg machine, but as a director McQuarrie is nowhere near as witty or kinetic as Bird. Bits that read well on paper — that opening airplane stunt, a Hitchcockian standoff between three assassins during an opera, a dive into a submerged computer bank — are staged with little pizzazz. Any charge these sequences have comes when McQuarrie trots out Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission: Impossible” theme, like a flailing vaudeville act bringing out the dancing girls when the audience starts to boo. There are colorful locales aplenty (Belarus, Vienna and Morocco) but globe-trotting elegance has never been a series hallmark, so we get only a few establishing shots for our troubles. And if it’s fun characters you’re looking for, keep looking; the baddies are comprised of faceless European heavies and a mastermind (Sean Harris) who hisses his lines like a radiator in February. When Jeremy Renner (as Hunt’s handler) is reduced to taking phone calls, and ultra-lefty Alec Baldwin is cast as a disapproving CIA boss with nothing to do, we’re dealing with a serious dearth of imagination.
The M:I series has been around long enough to start cannibalizing itself: Rogue Nation has a motorcycle chase out of M:I-2, a disk containing secret identities from M:I-1, brief homilies about the importance of friends beamed in from M:I-3. But whatever their faults, previous entries had the distinct stamp of their directors on them — Brian DePalma’s near-hysterical brio, John Woo’s doves and slow-mo shootouts, J.J. Abrams’ twisty plot pivots and even twistier shaky-cam, and Bird’s playfulness. McQuarrie can only muster anonymous competence, which means that Rogue Nation, diverting and professional as it is, is the most forgettable of them all. Still, there are a few nuggets to be found in the debris. Simon Pegg is his redoubtable self as the tech help/comic relief, and the aforementioned motorcycle chase is sleek and to-the-point. Speaking of to-the-point, we also have the pleasure of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a double (triple?) agent in the employ of the bad guys. While the plot dithers and the action scenes chug rather than soar, Ferguson cuts through the movie like a stiletto, whether she’s flashing her gams through a split opera gown, or performing a Ronda Rousey-worthy takedown.
And then, finally, inevitably, there’s Cruise himself. He hasn’t moved past his preening self-regard as much as he’s found a way to modulate it, much like Roger Moore in his latter-day Bond movies. Typically, a movie star becomes more insufferable as his career marches on; Cruise has performed a semi-miracle by moving in the opposite direction. While he’s still going all-out to earn the audience’s love, he now wears an extra layer of wariness which becomes him. Chastened by Ferguson’s presence — there’s barely a hint of romance between them, despite the fact that Hunt meets up with Ilsa in Casablanca of all places — and soldiering through the movie with a look of bemused befuddlement, he’s more human than ever, or at least as close as he’s likely ever to get. “He is the living manifestation of destiny,” Baldwin says of Cruise’s character, and it’s easy to see Rogue Nation as just another etching in the towering edifice that is Tom Cruise, but the look of perplexity that creeps into the Cruise-meister’s eyes from time to time suggests that destiny, and derring-do, ain’t what it used to be.
