Mission improbable, but entertaining

By Jay Stone

Anyone looking for a preposterously entertaining summer movie — or, for those truly suffering from the heat, simply an entertaining summer movie that is preposterous — should head straight for Mission Impossible _ Rogue Nation. It’s sort of a combination of the Bourne films, James Bond, and a Road Runner short. Call it Mission Ridiculous, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

The MI films, of which this is the fifth, have become a reliable vehicle for, well, vehicles (crashing, racing, tumbling hood-over-trunk), brilliantly absurd plot twists, and amazing stunts. Most of the last are carried out by Tom Cruise who, at age 53, is not only criminally buff but is also able to hang from frightening heights — in Rogue Nation, he dangles on the outside of an airplane in flight, and that’s just the pre-credit sequence — or ride a motorcycle at dangerous speeds, tipping into curves an angle that is probably illegal.

Cruise has a touch of madness in his eyes, for reasons we need not go into here, but it serves him well in the role of Ethan Hunt, head of the top-secret organization that battles world conspiracies through sheer determination, intelligence, and bottomless budgets. Rogue Nation cranks up the crazy in both the story and in Cruise. You may want to consider the extra-large popcorn.

The movie starts in Minsk, although it will later travel to Casablanca, Paris, Havana, Vienna, London and other beauty spots of the modern action film, which is frequently half travelogue. Ethan gets his new mission, and is then captured just as the American government is about to disband the Mission Impossible team on a charge of “wanton brinksmanship,” which sounds like it should be in the ads. It is doing so at the urging of the bullish head of the CIA (the bullish Alec Baldwin), and it leaves Ethan and his team out in the cold.

So while being hunted by his own side, he must go rogue in his hunt to find the Syndicate, a world-wide conspiracy that is responsible for most of the airplane crashes, assassinations and, I believe, natural disasters of the past few decades. Fortunately, he has picked up an ally in Ilsa Faust (Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson), a British agent who appears to have made a pact with the devil, although she probably couldn’t help herself.

Or maybe not. Ilsa is the wild card in Rogue Nation, and if we trust her at all, it’s because she keeps taking off her high heels in the presence of Tom Cruise, a gallant gesture that Nicole Kidman famously said she was glad to abandon after their divorce. They’re a formidable crime-fighting team, especially when Ilsa jumps on people’s shoulders and chokes them to death with her thighs.

Hunt also assembles his old team, including the comically devoted computer genius Benji (Simon Pegg), the imposing Luther (Ving Rhames), and the rather bland Brandt (Jeremy Renner) who runs the now-criminal MI force. Together they tackle various impossible tasks — kidnapping a prime minister, or swimming underwater to reprogram a high-tech security system — that are explained quickly, but not quickly enough that you aren’t aware how outlandish they are. Fortunately, the movie not only shares this sense of wretched excess, it positively revels in it: after all, director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie is the man who once cast Cruise as the six-foot-five Jack Reacher and made us believe it, or at least not not believe it.

Nor is it all motorcycle stunts and airplane-dangling. There’s a long set piece at the Vienna Opera production of Turandot, where a group of killers is about to strike just as the tenor hits the final notes of Nessun dorma. Fortunately, Ethan is backstage, scampering up the scenery and figuring out how to use one of the film’s unique weapons, a saxophone that fires bullets. Eat your heart out, Charlie Parker. You too, Pavarotti.

Nessun dorma returns later as sort of the love theme of Mission Impossible _ Rogue Nation, but McQuarrie is wise enough to tamp down any intimations of romance. Mush would just get in the way here, and besides, things are preposterous enough.

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