Review

Mission: Fairly Difficult?

Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt a little tired as the super spy tackles yet another caper

As Ethan Hunt, 53-year-old Tom Cruise is actually hanging onto the outside of this plane because the actor insisted on filming his own stunts in Christopher McQuarrie’s "Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation."
As Ethan Hunt, 53-year-old Tom Cruise is actually hanging onto the outside of this plane because the actor insisted on filming his own stunts in Christopher McQuarrie’s "Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation."

Both are renowned super-agents, ruggedly handsome, impossibly skilled, brilliantly conniving, and absolutely indefatigable when it comes to achieving a difficult objective. But the main difference between James Bond and Ethan Hunt is really in the people portraying the characters: There have been seven actors to portray Bond since his debut in 1962; since the first Mission: Impossible film, back in 1996, there has only been one Hunt, and that would be Tom Cruise. No Bond actor has survived longer in the role than Roger Moore ('73-'85, a total of 12 years); Cruise has now been playing Hunt for the better part of two decades.

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Paramount Pictures

Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) is a skilled but untested British intelligence agent who has succeeded in infilltrating an international group of outlaw operatives in "Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation."

Of course, the actors playing Bond realized their place in the grand pecking order -- at best, you were loaned the Walther PPK and the sleek tux for a few years -- whereas, as star and full producer, Cruise has the ultimate authority over Hunt and the series as a whole. Leaking into his mid-50s now, Cruise still sprints all over hell in his films and gamely performs a vast majority of his own stunts (no doubt giving the army of other producers and money guys behind the scenes nightmarish visions of the financial repercussions if anything were to happen to him), but despite the best efforts of his bevy of personal trainers and life coaches, there are creeping signs of age and wear on Cruise's once immaculate face. The eyes stay crinkled after a patented smile, the neck is notably sagging in a couple of scenes, even his hair, so perky and coiffed in the '96 film, is notably flat, and there's a certain weariness to his performance, even one as tailored to his talents as this one. Because of the constant swapping out, Bond is perpetually at his physical (and sexual) peak; Hunt is starting to look a bit long in the tooth.

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation

79 Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris, Simon McBurney, Alec Baldwin

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Rating: PG-13, for sequences of action and violence, and brief partial nudity

Running time: 131 minutes

Here, he is once again trying to track down an imposing enemy, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), the head of a shadowy cartel known only as "the Syndicate," composed of former agents from all over the world who were thought to be killed in action. Instead, it has been conspiring to commit a vast array of terrorist crimes all over the world, attempting to blow apart governmental order in order to topple the existing infrastructure and feed into revolution. Just why that is its objective is not exactly explained, although Hunt suggests it's a way for Lane to get back at the world for all the evil things he was forced to do in service to his country, which I suppose is as good an explanation as any. In any event, the Syndicate does need an enormous amount of money to accomplish its goals, and it needs Ethan and his team to help it inadvertently extract it.

En route to his eventual showdown with Lane, Hunt also makes friendly with Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), a British agent, sent into deep cover to infiltrate Lane's organization, and who may or may not being playing both sides against each other for reasons as yet unknown.

Each M:I film falls into a familiar pattern by now (somewhat amusingly following a formula largely established by the '60s TV show for whom the vast majority of the film's target demo will never have seen): There is a supremely confident enemy, some insane heist caper, generally involving an intricate plan in order to gain access into absolutely impregnable fortresses; some item of great worth and political significance is then stolen and used as bait to flush out the enemy, in order to take them out of the picture. You can also expect a bunch of nifty spy hardware, many whirlwind double-crosses, and a key scene where a character you think is one person is actually someone else in a prosthetic rubber mask.

It can be a charming formula, especially when properly tweaked and teased (see Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol), but by this point, if these adjustments aren't made, the films can start to feel awfully similar to one another. One thing that has changed in the M:I series is the director, from Brian De Palma, to John Woo, to J.J. Abrams, to Brad Bird, and now Christopher McQuarrie. The filmmakers who really struck gold were the ones who could either outwit their audience (De Palma's film remains a study in amusingly twisty confusion), or throw enough obstacles in the way of Hunt and his team achieving success, you felt like they had really earned the payoff at the end (bravo, Mr. Bird).

McQuarrie's vision is really neither of those things. From a story perspective, things follow more or less according to the established formula, with the standard number of car chases, fast-paced beat-downs, and seemingly unmanageable escapades, each fit into their respective slots. The center showpiece of the film -- where Hunt and Benji (Simon Pegg) break into the aforementioned seemingly impregnable fortress, involving a centrifugal, water-cooled computer hub, along with Ilsa -- offers enough resistance to be amusing, but is lacking the final, inspired twists and turns of Bird's previous installment to really knock the breath out of you. Several times, in fact, the film sets up a pretty exciting scene, only to let its characters off the hook a bit too easily to be particularly stirring.

Instead, we're treated to a display of impressive stunt-work from its principal actors -- for God's sake, literally within the film's first five minutes, we're treated to a scene with Cruise hanging on for dear life to a plane as it takes off from a runway and hurtles through the sky -- and the dubious delight of watching yet another famously liberal actor, in this case Alec Baldwin, digging greedily into the role of one of the kinds of egocentric government heads they dearly oppose in real life (see also Redford, Robert, in Captain America: The Winter Soldier).

Through it all, Cruise performs his gritty stunts and nails every significant line with his trademark verve, but we can't be too far away from Hunt's retirement (if so, expect a previously unknown son to take the reins). Like a TV show that hangs on for a couple more seasons than it should have, things are starting to get more than a little rote. To that end, it doesn't help when the script follows such well-traversed pathways. It's a reasonably engaging action caper, I suppose, but slightly less than impressively Impossible, as the series title demands. Perhaps we can go with Mission: Fairly Difficult instead.

MovieStyle on 07/31/2015

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