Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is a spy film concerning a sinister organisation – possibly spun off from the western intelligence services – that gains sinister autonomy and sets out to rhubarb, horseshoe, banana boat, where's my flange, Mildred?
Nobody much cares about the plot of the fifth Mission: Impossible film. What we have here is a Cruise delivery system. It has an even more specific purpose than that. These days, Tom Cruise pictures succeed on their takings in non-Anglophone territories. Rogue Nation seeks to inject concentrated Tomoxon directly into the Eastern bloodstream. It should do the trick very nicely.
There is more than enough dialogue. But it is mostly utilitarian gibberish aimed at shuttling Ethan Hunt – the series’ frustratingly indistinct hero – from underwater peril to hurtling motorbike to fist-fights in Unesco World Heritage Sites. Nothing if not inclusive in its dedication to travel porn, the film brings Hunt and his crew to Paris, where they see the Eiffel Tower, to Vienna, where we enjoy a shootout in the State Opera, and onwards to some famous building in Casablanca. While in London, they run past more of Giles Gilbert Scott’s red phone boxes than still exist in the United Kingdom.
The mechanism for Cruise delivery is looking very creaky indeed. Hard though it may be to believe, the first Mission: Impossible film emerged nearly 20 years ago. By this stage in the Bond cycle, we were already at Octopussy, for Pete's sake. Yet Cruise is still looking like a wee boy. He has that wee-boy hair and that wee-boy chin. One half expects him to pull off one of those M:I latex masks to reveal a battered Nick Nolte beneath.
None of this makes the hints of romance with Rebecca Ferguson’s young British agent any less queasy, but it’s comforting that he seems capable of walking wings without jarring a vertebra.
If only the Mission: Impossible brand were bearing up so well. What exactly is the USP here? The wonderful original series, nearly half a century old, tailored confidence tricks to the Cold War era. Presented with an apparently (ahem) impossible dilemma, the glamorous team, boosted by improbable technology, solved it in the manner of hi-tech three-card-Monte hucksters.
Mission: Impossible is just another spy film. We begin with Hunt attempting to spring a Mcguffin from a hurtling transport plane. Some time later, he is directed to London where, in a vinyl record shop, he goes through the ritual of listening to a message that "will self-destruct". But there's a twist. This particular recording has been placed by an evil body called "The Syndicate". Hang on? The Syndicate? Is that the best Christopher McQuarrie, taking over writing and directing duties, can manage? He may as well have called it Generic Antagonists #145.
Anyway, Hunt and his team – Simon Pegg quips; Ving Rhames rumbles; Jeremy Renner snoozes – are soon propelled into a mess of cross and double-cross that rarely rises above the sophistication of a Danger Mouse episode. "We only think we're on the right side because that's what we choose to believe," Miss Ferguson's character says at one point. Ooo! Get you, distaff George Smiley with your existential confusion and everything.
After about an hour (out of a punishing 135 minutes) we do eventually encounter an impossible mission of the old school. By then, however, the sheer ordinariness of the project will have anaesthetised most brains. None of which matters very much for the film's prospects. The Tomoxon is rammed into the metabolism with such unrelenting force that we are sure to see Mission Impossible: Adjective Noun in two years' time.
