There is not an original bone in Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation's battered, bloody but freakishly toned body. Its globe-trotting, double-crossing, death-defying, eardrum-rattling, wise-cracking, good-looking shenanigans are a mirepoix of every action-adventure film since Alfred Hitchcock was in short pants. This is comfort-food cinema. Gorge on the endless buffet.
The fifth -- and, easily, the best -- installment in the based-on-an-old-TV-show franchise is the loudest, fastest, hardest version of every action-adventure-spy thriller you've ever seen. Take Casablanca, early Connery-era Bond, Cary Grant- and Jimmy Stewart-starring Hitchcock and The Manchurian Candidate. Then cap it off with Tom Cruise top-gunning down a winding mountainside road astride a motorcycle while his open shirt whips in the wind. For grins, throw in a little Get Smart.
Every moment's a climax. A much-ballyhooed sequence -- look, that's actually Tom Cruise hanging off an actual airplane -- opens the film. It's over and done with before the audience has sipped its first soda, almost like an afterthought. But why save anything when there's everything still to come?
The plot is a genre staple: Government spys once heralded as world-savers are branded as outlaws and sent into exile just as The Most Dangerous Villain Ever rises to power under the cover of myth and bureaucratic deniability. The good guys -- who won't take "you're fired" for an answer -- do good. The bad guys -- spearheaded by a creep in need of a throat lozenge (Sean Harris) who employs thought-dead ex-government assassins armed with assault rifles and bad aim -- do worse. And in between them all is the femme fatale (the excellent Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa, because Casablanca) with murky allegiances that are actually pretty crystal-clear but let's just pretend, OK?
And they're all looking for the same thing: a USB drive.
Writer-director Chris McQuarrie (who wrote and directed the bleak and hysterical The Way of the Gun after winning an Oscar for penning The Usual Suspect) embraces every cliché like a long-lost lover: the assassination attempt at the opera (Turandot, in this case), the car chase through Moroccan back alleys, the breath-holding underwater file-swap, the encrypted computer disc that can only be opened with a retinal scan and the British prime minister's recitation of some Rudyard Kipling.
And standing, flexing, sweating, running and gunning at the center of this shiny chaos is a 53-year-old man 19 years into a franchise he kickstarted: Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, sneeringly referred to by his boss as "the living manifestation of destiny." That lands as a punch line when delivered by the great Alec Baldwin, who, even as the CIA boss, is still doing 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy.
Ethan Hunt and Daniel Craig's Bond have morphed into the same character at this late date: bitter, betrayed, weary, burdened by loss and anguish and regret. For both, the spy game's lost its luster; killing people just isn't as fun as it used to be when your superior's aiming a sniper rifle at the back of your neck (again!).
Beyond the ever-escalating pile of dollar bills, Cruise was wise to resurrect the TV show and turn into an Imax franchise. In the M:I series, he gets to play Ethan with an actual emotional arc -- from fresh(ish)-faced, buzz-cut whiz kid in Film No. 1 to husband in entry three to exiled Cold Warrior. We're having tons of fun; but Ethan looks like he stopped enjoying himself right around the time Film 4's director Brad Bird turned him into Coyote and Road Runner.
But that's the joke: Ethan's the humorless leader of a band of super buddies who might as well be named Scotty (Simon Pegg, now with a blessedly amped-up role), Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames, of whom there's never enough) and Not Jason Bourne (Jeremy Renner, again wasted). The man doesn't crack a smile. This is serious business ... well, big business, anyway.
Assume the next Mission: Impossible will be even bigger. And louder.
