No matter how you feel about Tom Cruise the person, Tom Cruise the actor is one of the best when it comes to action films. His willingness to do his own stunts (like hanging off the side of a plane, for instance) and always-smooth delivery make him one-of-a-kind in blockbuster action cinema.
The mixture of Cruise with a winning script and cast to work with make “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” one of the better films of the summer.
After his opening “plane ride,” Ethan Hunt (Cruise) learns of a super criminal spy organization called the Syndicate with plans for global domination, and is captured by them. CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) appeals to the United States Senate to have the Impossible Mission Force, Ethan’s spy organization, disbanded and made a part of the CIA. Hunley insists that IMF has outlived its usefulness, and organizes a manhunt for Ethan.
Meanwhile, former IMF agents William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) try to stop the manhunt before it starts with the added challenge of being unable to contact Ethan.
The person to bust Ethan out is Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a Syndicate double agent. Ethan meets up with Ilsa again alongside his old friend Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) at an opera in Vienna and from there the duo teams up to defeat the mysterious Syndicate and take out their leader, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris).
In addition to the plane scene, there are plenty of other, well, impossible tasks to be performed in this mission, most notably disabling an underwater mechanism in a high-pressure vacuum without an oxygen mask in only three minutes. The actors make you believe that they are actually doing these tasks.
Pegg, Renner, Baldwin and Rhames add a strong amount of dry humor that makes this movie funnier than most summer comedies, even with its classification as an action spy film. Ferguson is a welcome addition to the cast and an enjoyable up-and-coming action heroine.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to see this film, and in Imax if you can. If you lose your ticket, the movie theater will disavow any knowledge of you ever having bought one. Good luck. This article will self-destruct in – oh, wait, this isn’t written on self-destructing paper. Never mind. Just see the movie.
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