Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (2015)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, I think this is one film in the series that I somehow missed in the theater, thus I’m remembering it the least upon this screening.

Did I Like It: Yeah…

On that note, I’ve come to some conclusions about the Mission: Impossible series as a whole. Like the television series that begat it, the movies suffer ever so slightly when watched in succession. The format is relatively unchanging, especially after the series fell under the auspices of J.J. Abrams and his company, Bad Robot effective with Mission: Impossible III (2006). There is little variation in these films. Sure, the ubiquitous “your mission, should you choose to accept it” scene in this film harkens back to its televised analog roots, before pulling the rug out from under us and enveloping super spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) into a web of villainy before the first reel is over. That’s refreshing and does its level headed best to renew interest in this new story.

From there, however, that twist doesn’t hold up. It gives way to yet another survey of internal difficulties in the CIA that Hunt will nullify with his brazenness. What’s more, the proceedings have continued to grow a little pat in other ways. There are masks. Tom Cruise dangles from improbable heights. Ving Rhames shows up. There’s a throwaway reference to the first film that floats in the air for an instant before evaporating just as quickly as it arrived. Incidentally, those scant references are usually my favorite part of one of these movies, Cruise conscientiously defying the forces of gravity be damned.

All of that isn’t even meant as a criticism of this film or the series as a whole, really. This film, too, is a pleasant way to spend two hours. It may be better to do so every couple of years and then not think too much about it afterwards.

At the time of this writing, McQuarrie is hard at work on the seventh and eighth film in the series, his third and fourth. This series once was a showcase for great (or in some cases, potentially great) directors to play around in a tried and true genre. Now that McQuarrie is here to stay, let’s hope he gets bored and decides to throw us a few more curveballs in the process.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton

Have I Seen it Before: As my reviews for the other movies in this series have already mentioned, I’m a sucker for Tom Cruise dangling improbably from things. As he ages, he hasn’t slowed down. It may be the single greatest argument for Scientology (or, at least, the elite levels of Scientology) that is out there. One can not argue with results. But, to answer the question, I’ll probably be there opening weekend until Cruise is well into his 70s, or if he becomes completely Clear, whichever happens first.

At it’s most basic, good storytelling is a study in obstacle. Get somebody stuck up in a tree, and show how they get down, and that’s about as tight of a story as one can tell. With that in mind, there may be no better graduate level course in this theory than the Dubai sequence of this film. A typical Mission story would have the IMF under the leadership of Ethan Hunt (Cruise) fooling the assassins and the arms dealers. 

Passing through the prism of Brad Bird’s brain, complications pile onto complications to the point where Hunt is climbing the tallest building ever conceived of by man one handed, while a sand storm looms in the distance, and everything else in the scheme is going completely wrong as well.

Here, we have a filmmaker so thoroughly in command of his craft allowed to work magic in a major motion picture franchise. Brad Bird is a better, more pure filmmaker than J.J. Abrams, and possible even De Palma. Whereas Bird’s worst film,

While the rest of the film might be standard action fare, every shot in that hotel is so thrilling, that the memory of a TV show that was once about occasional freelance spies running operations that were essentially heists disappears. Mission: Impossible has now delivered on the ambition that the series has reached for since the original film. We have an American James Bond, and that American 007’s films are on average far better on average than the output of the thing they were trying to mimic. Maybe that quality will ebb, but if it takes twenty or thirty films, that’s going to be plenty of fun in the meantime.