Sequel Month - Mini Review - Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

It’s June, and you know what that means!

SEQUEL MONTH!

And FYI, I had this planned since before the Nostalgia critic announced his sequel month. But there’s a difference in that I’m only spotlighting sequels to recent high profile movies and games, sequels that came out from 2015 onwards. We’ll go through the good, the bad and the awful and let’s start with Mission Impossible.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation came out in July 2015 (we’ll be doing these in chronological order) to a great financial performance and favourable reviews. My reviews of the previous entries came under Cruise Month, 1 was ok, 2 was terrible and 3 and 4 were marked improvements, will the 5^th instalment carry on this escalation of quality? Let’s take a look

Ethan Hunt is investigating the activities of a criminal organisation called the syndicate, a ‘rogue nation’ of former intelligence members banded together to change the world through targeted attacks. Unfortunately, the CIA has branded the IMF a failure and has had it closed down. For the umpteenth millionth time in Tom Cruise movie, he’s a fugitive and only has a small number of allies and acquaintances to stop the syndicate.

So yes, it goes through the average motions of a Tom Cruise movie, but unlike back in Cruise, I’ve not seen it dozens of times in a brief period and I’m not sick of it. This is a great movie with some great action and suspense, some genuinely interesting characters and whilst I hesitate to call it deep, it does linger on characters and motivations and makes the audience question how things might turn out.

Solomon Lane is a great villain. I love smart villains over strong ones and whilst he has flaws, Solomon Lane might well be the smartest villain Ethan Hunt has come across. About midway through the movie he intends to kill the Austrian prime minister in a theatre, he doesn’t have one assassin but 3 and then, since Hunt takes them out of the picture, he has a car bomb as well. That is well prepared and quickly shows us that he’s a villain to take seriously, and he doesn’t really even appear in the scene. How does Ethan Hunt outsmart him, well I don’t want to give too much away but Ethan Hunt is especially unpredictable in this movie. It’s a testament to Cruise how he can go from fierce and determined to near enough mental instability so quickly.

A lot of the alumni from previous movies are back. Ving Rhames, who had only a cameo in Ghost Protocol is back for a bigger role this time and all the male cast from Ghost Protocol including Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg are back. Simon Pegg is hit and miss, it’s nice that he adds levity but can be kind of annoying, as his characters in the comedies he’s more famous for often are. I’ll be reviewing Absolutely Anything in due course, piece of cr*p that is. Ving Rhames and Jeremy Renner are good in this movie.

Newcomer to the series is Alec Baldwin, the CIA operative overseeing the hunt for Ethan Hunt (get it?) I usually like Alec Baldwin and it’s no exception here, just keep him away from low budget YA rip-offs and we’ll be fine.

But I think you know what the best part of this movie is. Rebecca Ferguson plays Isla Faust, an MI6 Operative deep within the syndicate who is the femme fatale for the proceedings. She’s far more interesting than most of the love interests because it’s hard to tell what angle she’s playing, becoming even more interesting when find out her backstory has her labelled as an international assassin to protect her cover and she really has no friends to run to. She is, I suppose, in many ways the ideal counterpart to Hunt and their chemistry feels brilliant. Add to that she is a badass in her own right and we have the single best female character from these movies.

I like the colours, the globetrotting, I love the underwater scene, the action is easy to follow, the humour works reasonably well for the most part, do I have nit-picks, well yes, first that character arcs aren’t handled very well. Ethan came off at one point sounding like a lunatic but we don’t see resolution to it and the others don’t really have much of a character arc at all.

But overall this is a fantastic movie and a promise of the next one studying Ethan as a person more and not just some guy with a weird case of hero complex sometimes is something I’m very interested in, so long as it continues with what made this one great

Rating 83/100