We know that Ethan Hunt, the character, is indestructible.
Crash his car, wreck his motorbike, kidnap him, drown him and deprive his mind of oxygen — he’s modern cinema’s Timex watch, or as one character succinctly dubs him, “the living manifestation of destiny.”.
Similarly, so long as there is a Tom Cruise, there presumably will be an Ethan Hunt and more missions of a not-so-possible nature.
The only variables left in plotting the long tail of the “Mission: Impossible” series are whether they can keep bringing in top directorial talent — on par with Brian De Palma, Brad Bird and John Woo — to keep the action strong, and decent writers to make the story compelling.
The latest installment, “Rogue Nation,” demonstrates that five films in, managing to land just one of those factors keeps things just interesting enough to prevent viewers from writing off the series.
Unfortunately, “Rogue Nation” only benefits from having writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (“Jack Reacher”) behind the lens and not from his script work.
Case in point: The ballyhooed stunt scene of Cruise hanging onto the side of a plane is over just as quickly as it gets off the ground. Is it exhilarating and well-paced? Sure. It would be something of a show-stopper if only it had much actual bearing on the story. Instead it opens the show, bringing us to the lit-fuse opening title.
And that is the biggest drawback of this installment: It moves from set piece to set piece with only a smattering of intrigue. For a spy thriller series that’s prided itself on geopolitical narratives to facilitate all the fun action sequences, “Rogue Nation” is content to settle for less this time out.
The premise — that a multinational collective of agents dubbed “the Syndicate” working to induce terror as something of an “anti-IMF” — is a convenient way to steal tragedies from real-world headlines and tie them together into one big conspiracy, in much the same way M. Night Shymalan’s “Unbreakable” did.
The crowning achievement of this spy-vs.-spy setup is that it introduces Rebecca Ferguson (“Hercules,” “The White Queen”) as an is-she, isn’t-she double agent Ilsa Faust, setting up assassinations and other mayhem for Syndicate chief Soloman Lane (played by a raspy, soft-spoken Sean Harris).
Unfortunately, “Rogue Nation” only benefits from having writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (“Jack Reacher”) behind the lens and not from his script work.
Ferguson injects tremendous life into the film without succumbing to the fate of so many other female characters in spy films: a potential romantic lead for one of the guys. Instead, she’s the catalyst to lead Hunt, Benji (Simon Pegg) and Brandt (Jeremy Renner) across Russia, London and Morocco as they are once again on the run from their own government after CIA Director Hunley (Alec Baldwin) gets the IMF dissolved and folded into his own agency.
The machinations leading them across the globe and closer to reeling in Lane are quickly paced and make the film feel like non-stop action, but the reality is that “Rogue Nation” is almost too lean and mean for its own good.
Cruise is an otherworldly performer, still pulling off athletic feats that even stars half his age save for the stunt guys. But “Mission: Impossible” needs to have a real mission — a story — and not just exist as an excuse for spectacle.
Rated PG-13. Two hours, 11 minutes. Two and a half stars out of five.