It's been almost 20 years since Tom Cruise accepted his first Mission as Ethan Hunt, agent for the under-the-radar Impossible Missions Force.
Hunt has attained a sort of rock star status over the years. In the latest instalment, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, a pretty spy groupie half his age gushes early on in the film, "It really is you! I've heard stories. They can't all be true." We, the viewer, feel much the same way watching a 53-year-old Cruise pummel life into a genre continually on the verge of flat-lining, restricted as it is by a certain amount of cliched dialogue, obligatory chase scenes and those ticking time bombs that are always threatening to go off.
It's all there, of course, but Cruise throws himself into the role with such impressive energy and conviction — and perhaps a death wish, if the gravity-defying opening stunt is any indication — that we get swept along, too. And director Christopher McQuarrie, who directed Cruise in Jack Reacher and wrote Edge of Tomorrow, manages to tweak convention just enough to make this fifth Cruise Mission feel fresh.
Referring back to some of the extensive damage done in Ghost Protocol, CIA stiff Alan Huntley (Alec Baldwin) calls for the disbandment of the IMF, recalling Ethan and his fellow agents from the field. Tech expert Benji and agent Brandt (Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner, returning from the last M:I film) are absorbed into the CIA fold, but Ethan is essentially marooned, and number one in Huntley's crosshairs: "Hunt is both arsonist and firefighter at the same time," he blusters. (Ving Rhames, returning as Ethan's loyal friend, is given little to do.)
Ethan refuses to return until he takes down The Syndicate, the "rogue nation" of the title, a collection of highly skilled, presumed-dead operators who facilitate global disasters to engineer a new world order. The disasters — plane crashes, industrial accidents — could have been plucked from recent headlines.
Before that, however, there's a lovely little setpiece at the Viennese Opera involving a European head of state and no less than three snipers, including an old-school German villain with impossibly high cheekbones (Jens Hulten) and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who may either be Ethan's saviour or his downfall, we can't decide. The setting also allows for a nice melding of Lilo Schifrin's classic theme with Puccini's Turandot: you'll never hear "Nessun Dorma" the same way again.
When he's not being rescued by Ilsa Ethan spends the picture tracking down the head of the Syndicate (Sean Harris), a delusional former agent who blames government and big corporate for the state of the world. The system is the enemy, a concept that induces a crisis of conscience in Ethan and the other agents while playing nicely to the members of the 99 per cent who bought tickets to the film.
Dialogue is over-explanatory and flat-out silly in places ("Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny!"), but otherwise the script is economical and right on the money.
But back to the stunts...
Cruise must free dive into a water turbine, hold his breath for an eternity in a space-age underwater vault and switch a computer program in order for Benji (given a more heroic/less comic role here), to avoid being liquified by an impassible security system. Ilsa, no shrinking Violet, breaks a man's neck with her thighs and dispatches several more. And Cruise hops back on his now-trademark motorbike for a chase involving a half dozen other motorcycles that whip through city and desert highway with sickeningly realistic curve-hugging excitement. All that swerving camerawork helps us overlook the fact that Ethan wears neither leathers nor helmet and wipes out at high speed without a scratch on that pretty face. All the better for the next Mission, 20-plus years later.
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation plays at at Dunbar, Park and Scotiabank.
