Mission: Rewatchable - 'Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation'
Mission: Rewatchable - 'Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation'
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to revisit all previous Mission: Impossible movies in advance of July 12's Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. Next up in the queue: 2015's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. This retrospective will self-destruct in 3... 2... 1...
Since Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation's release in 2015, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has become as much a steward of the franchise as star/producer Tom Cruise - as of this writing, the man sometimes known as 'McQ' has made three of these movies, with a fourth on the way. It's kind of a bummer that they're not using a new filmmaker with a very different perspective on the IP every time, but McQuarrie is behind all the best Mission movies, save for Brian De Palma's original. It's hard to begrudge Cruise for wanting McQuarrie to come back again and again and again.
McQuarrie maybe wasn't the most obvious choice to take over the series, but he was a very, very good one. He made his name with his screenplay for The Usual Suspects, a twisty thriller that won him an Best Original Screenplay Oscar, so he obviously has a talent for both labyrinthine plots based around characters perpetually deceiving one another, and for creating supporting roles that are highly memorable even when they don't actually have that much to do.
He had also already proven to be a capable action director. His feature directing debut, 2000's The Way of the Gun, isn't a great movie - but it has at least one action sequence that is exciting and funny and unique:
Twelve years later, McQuarrie wrote and directed Jack Reacher, in which he made you believe that a 5'7" middle-aged Scientologist could actually be a Bad Motherfucker. Note the way McQuarrie bucked post-Bourne trends, employing the ancient art of actually allowing the audience to see what the fuck is going on during the fight scenes:
Still, Rogue Nation's $150 million budget was more than twice that of Jack Reacher. So good on Cruise for recognizing McQuarrie's potential. The plot in Rogue Nation doesn't make a whole lot more sense than the ones in previous Missions, but the characters and action sequences are both crackerjack, so it doesn't matter.
On the subject of characters: Not only does McQuarrie bring back recurring characters Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and Brandt (Jeremy Renner), he finds a way to give them all something to do. Furthermore, he recognizes that Ethan's best celebrity IMF boss to date, Laurence Fishburne, was fun because he was the equivalent of the angry police captain in '80s action movies - so he makes Ethan's latest celebrity IMF boss, Alec Baldwin, a similar sort of fellow, which allows to Baldwin to flex some of his curmudgeonly comedic chops. And in Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), he FINALLY gives Ethan a female character who feels like she's actually his equal.).
Ilsa, like Jack Reacher, is a Bad Motherfucker. Anything Ethan can do, she can do better. Her alliances are perpetually in question, and neither Ethan nor the audience know whose side she's actually on. But she's also playful and flirty (in a very British sort of way), and Ferguson and Cruise have real chemistry. There's a natural spark here that was missing from all of Ethan's previous relationships in these movies. You just want these two crazy kids to find a way to work it out (and by "kids," I mean a 53-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman).
If there's a weak supporting character in this movie, it's the new heavy, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). Yeah, Harris dispenses his dialogue in a creepy, serpentine whisper, and he really sells Lane's heartlessness. But the character comes off as kind of an idiot. Ilsa is supposed to be working with Lane, but she helps Ethan again and again and again so that he can "conveniently" escape Lane's clutches. Yet she always goes back to Lane and is like "Aw, nards, Ethan got the best of me!" And yeah, he's suspicious of her - but it's bonkers that he keeps her around at all. We actually see him kill another one of his operatives him for far lesser offenses than the ones committed by Ilsa.
Also, not the biggest deal in the world, but Lane looks like a turtle, and turtles aren't scary.
As for the action sequences, McQuarrie simply, MWAH!, cooked 'em to perfection. And I don't just mean the movie's most famous stunt, for which they hung Tom Cruise off the side of a goddamn airplane.
Everything is so well choreographed, shot, and edited. Take, for example, this scene at the Vienna State Opera, where Ethan and Benji are attempting to stop an assassination attempt against some politician because reasons (it honestly does not matter). It's a short film unto itself, a story within a story, told mostly without dialogue (it's not surprising to hear McQuarrie cite The General as a major influence on his Mission movies).
There are four separate threads: Ethan following one would-be sniper up to the rafters, Benji being Ethan's "guy in the chair," a second would-be killer in the lighting booth, and Ilsa, also surreptitiously bearing a weapon, her intentions not yet clear. Ethan doesn't realize that the rafters move, so as he's sneaking up behind the would-be sniper, the platform on which he's standing finally lifts up into the air. Consequently, Ethan has jump down to attack his target, thus giving away the element of surprise. Ethan's fall is less-than-smooth, and only when he and the would-sniper both rise to their feet, struggling for control of a gun, does Ethan realize that the dude is twice his size (the way Cruise is unafraid of showing Ethan's fear and physical vulnerability during this moment is crucial - it's funny and it makes Ethan even more of an underdog for whom the viewer can root). And then, even when Ethan finally dispenses with the big dude, he's suddenly faced with two potential assassins - Ilsa and the dude in the booth - but he only has one bullet. Benji, meanwhile, spots the guy in the booth but can't get ahold of Ethan, so he races towards to booth to do what he can there. With only seconds to choose a course of action (the opera works as a ticking clock), Ethan suddenly shoots the very politician he was sent to protect... in the arm. The politician, naturally, gets the hell out of dodge, inadvertently taking himself out of the sights of the guy who wants to actually kill him. The guy in the booth thus sets his sights on Ethan. Ilsa then starts shooting at Ethan... but only to get him to flee from the guy in the booth! The guy in the booth then shoots Ilsa, and then Benji finally storms in and takes care of the last remaining villain.
The way McQuarrie stacks trouble on top of trouble on top of trouble, perpetually tightening the screws and raising the stakes, feels more like a scene from Spielberg's old Indiana Jones movies than anything in Dial of Destiny does. Call me corny, this kind of thing gets me really excited, because it's a task to which cinema, out of all artistic mediums, is uniquely suited - anyone in the world can watch this, regardless of their native language, and follow what's going on. And it's fun, too!
https://youtu.be/jU2TU--E6OEhttps://youtu.be/FRTkFU1xSwYhttps://youtu.be/cPd4f-M6ibw
To reiterate: McQuarrie, cinematographer Robert Elswit (the same guy who shot most of PTA's movies!), and editor Eddie Hamilton (Kick-Ass, Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick) deserve all the kudos and then some, because they didn't shoot their action scenes with a camera operator filming mostly in close-ups while suffering from an epileptic fit (the past two decades have not always been great for these kinds of sequences).
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation:
https://youtu.be/NlGBTx495CM?t=220
Not Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMS6QnXtXQA&t=105s
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation:
Not Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW8dB0WAFac&t=33s
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation:
https://youtu.be/SB8BJM_67JU?t=77
Not Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation:
https://youtu.be/QyCADHc1LMY?t=47
Not every action beat in Rogue Nation is gravy - I don't love the underwater dive bit, which looks fake despite the fact that at least some of it was shot practically.
But at least that leads to the movie's big chase scene, which is, for my money, the best sequence in the whole thing. They did enough of it for real that even when they have no choice but to use VFX it's totally forgivable (to say nothing of that fact that said VFX don't call attention to themself because they're just parts of shots and not large swaths of the frame digitally created whole cloth). And like the opera scene, it's a little story within the story, and a constantly-snowballing array of difficulties for our heroes:
Rogue Nation is by no means perfect. As I said before, the plot is deeply, deeply dumb. Ethan goes on the lam yet AGAIN, Lane comes off as real nitwit (cough and chelonian cough cough), and the make a lot of choices that are dramatically expedient but logically nonsensical. For example, Ethan, who is on the run but needs Benji's aid, sends Benji tickets to the Vienna opera under the auspices of Benji having won a prize... but he sends it by snail mail ('cause the U.S. Postal Service is notoriously reliable?) to Benji's office at a freakin' INTELLIGENCE AGENCY where Alec Baldwin makes him undergo regular polygraph tests to see if he's in contact with Ethan. They needed the scene between Benji and Baldwin for expository purposes, but both practical and narrative levels, it's a waste of time and money to have a whole other scene where Benji goes to his apartment, so they just hope you don't notice that Ethan has done something so careless. I know it's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing they do a bunch of in this movie, and if the rest of the flick wasn't so gosh darn entertaining, you'd probably notice a lot more (see: Mission: Impossible 2).
Still, Rogue Nation is, without a doubt, the best movie in the series up to this point that wasn't directed by Brian De Palma. That's not faint praise (De Palma, at his absolute worst, is still usually better than 97% of all other directors). And just as importantly, it was really one big dress rehearsal for McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible - Fallout, which truly is the franchise high point.
I mostly just wish they'd found Henry Cavill sooner.