MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 5 REVIEW

Five films and nearly 20 years into the Mission: Impossible movie franchise, it’s still hard not to feel nostalgic for the original 60-70s TV series, the most rigorously formulaic thriller show ever. Each time the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) set about a new task, the viewer had to piece together the riddle of what was going on and work out how all the elements glimpsed in that week’s burning-fuse opening credits – say, a box of bees, fumes from a ventilator, someone dangling in a lift shaft, Martin Landau peeling off a false moustache – would combine into a coherent narrative. You always knew what the mission was, but it was only at the end that you discovered how it was done. Every episode was executed with perfect economy and quietly nerve-jangling precision: it was as close as you could get to 007 filmed by Robert Bresson.

The Mission: Impossible movies are very different – spectacular, splashy, relentless. And instead of an ensemble show, the films highlight Tom Cruise’s tireless multitasking capacities: he gets to wear the false moustaches and dangle down the lift shafts. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation takes the series’s glorification of its star (and producer) to absurd lengths. Early on, a young woman in an IMF station doubling as a record shop (vinyl? In 2015? At Piccadilly Circus? If only…) gazes wonderingly at Ethan Hunt (Cruise): “Is it really you? I’ve heard stories – they can’t all be true.” Later, Alec Baldwin’s CIA chief intones: “Hunt is the living personification of destiny.” That line got a big laugh at the screening I attended, though possibly not from any of Cruise’s fellow Scientologists present, who may well regard personifying destiny as a core duty of every signed-up member of the club.

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Previous episodes in the series felt like much of a hyperventilating muchness – apart from the last one, subtitled Ghost Protocol. Its director, Brad Bird, who made Pixar’s The Incredibles, treated the material like a live-action cartoon, making it the snappiest and wittiest instalment by far. By contrast, Rogue Nation simply gives value for money, strenuously so. Writer-director McQuarrie, who made 2012 Cruise vehicle Jack Reacher, goes in with all guns blazing, but those guns blaze almost constantly, without much modulation or narrative shape: the big production numbers just keep on rolling. This episode regales us with car action, motorbike action, underwater action, a vertiginous skirmish at the Viennese opera, and the usual liberal helping of abseiling. And editor Eddie Hamilton boots up the dynamics with cutting that’s possibly faster than any I’ve seen.
Continuity with the previous films is brought by Jeremy Renner (scowls), Simon Pegg (one-liners) and Ving Rhames (hats). But there are a few classy additions. One is Sean Harris, who imbues Solomon Lane, malign mastermind of an international shadow syndicate, with his peerless vileness – the pursed mouth of a man who’s been eating too many pickles, and a nasty nasal gurgle, like Gollum with the rheum. Another is Simon McBurney, suavely machiavellian in tortoiseshell specs.

London premiere of Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation - in pictures

But the film’s distinguishing asset is Rebecca Ferguson as an elusive International Woman of Mystery who gives Hunt a run for his money and represents the most no-nonsense female action role in this kind of fiction since… oh, at least Diana Rigg in TV’s The Avengers. She isn’t really a romantic/sexual foil to Hunt, despite at one point uttering an invitation almost Edwardian in its discretion: “Come away with me…” Rather, she’s a feline free agent, quizzically cerebral and something of a stylist when it comes to action; adept at knife-fighting, she also specialises in that leaping-on-necks trick practised by Daryl Hannah’s replicant in Blade Runner. And she’s called Ilsa Faust. All in all, there isn’t a more comprehensive femme fatale package imaginable.
Not to be overshadowed, Cruise continues to indulge his notorious penchant for doing his own stunts; one day, his insurance documents will be published in a deluxe collected edition. Here, he leaps off a 120ft ledge, holds his breath underwater for an unfeasibly long time, hangs off the side of a plane in flight, and does a rather natty with-one-bound-Jack-was-free escape, which involves him, hands bound, shinning up a pole upside down. Given Cruise’s undisputed superhuman qualities, you feel churlish complaining that his acting doesn’t measure up – it mainly runs to costive frowns of urgency and that patented never-felt-better grin.
The overall dazzle of the execution is offset by cursory plotting and leaden dialogue, which is disappointing from McQuarrie, who wrote the deathless The Usual Suspects. Without the wit of its previous instalment, M:I–RN feels a bit of an endurance championship, although if you’re in it for the action alone, you won’t feel shortchanged. The real mission I’d like to see Cruise tackle if the series continues would be to pare things down and retrieve some of the mathematical cool of the TV original, but in the age of blockbuster hyper-inflation, that may be an impossibility that even Mr Manifest Destiny can’t deliver.