Rogue Nation, the fifth installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, opens with The Big Stunt, the green screen-less set piece designed to make the case that Tom Cruise is a.) a great action star, and b.) dangerously committed to proving it. The stunt — Cruise, as intrepid secret agent Ethan Hunt, clings to the outside of a cargo plane during take off — doesn’t quite top the giddy rush of watching Cruise play Twister on top of the Burj Khalifa in 2011’s Ghost Protocol. Regardless, the sight of one of the world’s biggest celebrities hanging on for dear life as wind and gravity force his face into contortions is more thrilling than the computer-generated spectacle in some of this summer’s other blockbusters.
That unconventional flight sets the plot in motion and sets the tone for the rest of Rogue Nation, an action-packed blast that may be the best film in the series.
Cruise’s Hunt, a longtime do-gooder for the IMF spy agency, is pursuing a shadowy organization known as The Syndicate, a conglomeration of highly trained killers and former secret agents planning on doing very bad things. A clue from the cargo plane puts Hunt on the right track and introduces him to the double agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, who convincingly beats people up and wears a slinky yellow dress well, which is unfortunately all the role really asks of her).
At the same time, the U.S. government understandably elects to dissolve the IMF for its past behavior (see: the wanton destruction in the first four Mission: Impossible films), forcing Hunt to go rogue as he continues his search for Villain No. 1, the inscrutable Solomon Lane (a menacing and hoarse Sean Harris). It’s probably not a spoiler to say that the band eventually gets back together: Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner, and Simon Pegg return as Hunt’s partners in espionage.
Director Christopher McQuarrie, who collaborated with Cruise on the underrated Edge of Tomorrow and the slightly less overlooked Jack Reacher, devotes the majority of Rogue Nation‘s 131-minute runtime to high-caliber Hollywood stunts, including a car chase through the streets of Casablanca and a fistfight at the Vienna Opera. The violence and the globetrotting can be exhausting, but there’s enough humor (most of it courtesy of Pegg and an underused Alec Baldwin as the blustering head of the CIA) to add some levity to the proceedings.
The action, while frequently implausible and disdainful of established physics, still feels more tethered to the punishing laws of gravity than the cartoon spectacle of the latest in the Avengers and Fast and Furious franchises. There’s no jolly green Hulk pinballing through buildings into featherweight CGI baddies, no Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson flexing his way out of a cast.
Superspy Ethan Hunt is as impervious as Superman and more un-killable than a Looney Tune. But when he’s dangling from the side of a cargo plane or — in another tense scene that plays as sort of an underwater tribute to the famous wire-descending heist from the first film — holding his breath for three-plus minutes in service of an elaborate burglary, there’s a thrill that’s missing from summer action movies where the characters are protected by their super-powered shields. Vulnerability isn’t Cruise’s strong suit, but he can do urgency verging on panic — saving the world shouldn’t look easy, or pretty.
It’s that urgency, and Cruise’s almost desperate charisma, that help make him so compelling. At 53, he still seems determined to prove something — he’s not strapping himself to the side of a plane for the check. Cruise’s recent turns in middling-to-great action films like Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow similarly bank on that reckless charm. With another Mission: Impossible movie almost a foregone conclusion (a sequel to Jack Reacher is also in the works), Cruise has accepted his mission to be America’s greatest action star.
