It’s been almost four years since we last saw Tom Cruise kicking ass and taking names as Impossible Mission Force Agent Ethan Hunt, but he’s finally back, and up to all his old tricks.
Rogue Nation is helmed by director Christopher McQuarrie and is an action movie in the truest sense of the word. And in the rare moments when everything is calm, all you want is for chaos to begin again. The gadgets are sleek, the fighting is bare-knuckled and the maneuvering is perilous, especially when on really fast motorcycles.
The film begins, just as it ends–with a high-stakes mission. Hunt dangles perilously on the side of a plane, which is made all the more terrifying when you remember that Cruise did this stunt himself.
We are then treated to an expectedly short-tempered Alec Baldwin (as head of the CIA, Alan Hunley) reaming IMF associate William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) for Hunt’s cavalier approach to his most recent assignment. Hunley believes that the CIA should reign supreme and moves to bring his pesky IMF problem in front of a government panel in hopes of dismantling the organization.
Little does Hunley know, the Mission Impossible guys have been tracking suspicious activity from a terrorist group called The Syndicate, a network of global agents who are pretty much an anti-IMF. They are lead by Solomon Lane, a raspy-voiced villain who is as creepy as he is cunning. And with Hunt now a wanted man, getting to heart of The Syndicate, and facing off with Lane, has gotten that much harder.
Cruise, an action movie veteran at this point, still proves just as spry as ever; running, jumping and even careening backward in an expertly plugged BMW car. Along for the thrills are Hunt’s past cohorts Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames). However, it is Hunt and Dunn who have the most screen time together, with Dunn demonstrating time and again what a valuable right-hand man he can be.
And of course, as in every cool-guy movie, there must be a femme fatale of some kind. This time it is the wily Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a disavowed British intelligence agent who has been trying to infiltrate The Syndicate herself. She spins a tangled web of questionable allegiances with both Hunt and Lane, but always remains relatively unscathed.
Perhaps the best thing about Rogue Nation is that it walks the line between the surreal and the just believable. Ethan Hunt proves himself to be a more comical, less-serious version of the James Bond archetype, which is just fine in my book.
And with this being the fifth Mission Impossible film, the series doesn’t look to be shutting the door quite yet. Ethan Hunt is still eager and able-bodied, and if rumors are true about a future sixth film, Rogue Nation proves the IMF will never be an afterthought.
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