These days, if a movie is making coin you can guarantee it’s getting a sequel, followed by another and another. Fast and the Furious is on its seventh (and soon, eighth) instalment. Star Wars is about to start a whole new trilogy with a bunch of spin offs, and James Bond’s Spectre will be the 24th long and much-loved series.
Hot on the heels of the English spy classic is the Americanised version – Mission Impossible featuring the long-featured Tom Cruise in a film that looks like it was totally sponsored by BMW.
Seriously, every car and motorbike in this movie is a ‘beamer’. Like, Every. Single. One.
One of the few films in existence more successful than the TV show that spawned it, Tom Cruise stars in an action series with unusual longevity and originality in a fairly stale genre. With a cast that interchanges faster than a load of washing ‘Rogue Nation’ has stuck to what worked in the last MI film, Ghost Protocol.
The lovable larrikin Simon Pegg gets another run, and Jeremy Renner is back too, apparently sticking around until Cruise decides to hang up his boots as Ethan Hunt. Meanwhile, Ving Rhames (the only other cast member still around from the first film) dials in such a lethargic and lazy performance one can only assume he’s in the movie for ‘shits and giggles’.
So, there’s a baddie Solomon Lane. He’s an ex-spy who has a beef with the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) in a plot that threatens to unravel modern democracy in the Western World. Lane is hell-bent on creating a new world order comprised of former and disavowed spies from all over the world. The only hope to save the world is Ethan Hunt. For poor old Ethan this mission is going to be tough. His own countrymen have turned their back on him, and now he is solely responsible for shutting down (the terribly named) ‘Syndicate’ before chaos is unleashed.
Like a Bond movie, what follows is a series of exciting scenes in exciting locations around the world, double- and triple-crosses, audience manipulation and that famous theme tune ‘dundun-da-dundun, dundun da dundun…’
Director and writer, Christoper McQuarrie, must get props for his ‘less is more’ approach. There is hardly any CGI in this (which can also be attributed to Tom Cruise’s obsession with doing his own stunts), while an intentional constraint on the number of action scenes make the tension and suspense in the film’s climax much more dramatic. It’s a toned-down, honed-in action movie that is wonderfully refreshing after movies like San Andreas that destroy entire cities,
MI5 cares about its plot and is a thrill from start to finish. Clearly I’m not alone in my thoughts as surprise, surprise, there’s already a sixth movie on its way.
