Personal life and religious beliefs aside, it’s OK to love Tom Cruise for his increasingly cartoonish career, performing stunts that have gotten so extreme you have to wonder how he came about this motivation to defy death for a movie. Does his alarm clock tell him “You will die today” just so he has a naysayer to prove wrong? It’s also OK to hate him for his body of work consisting almost entirely of conventionally handsome yet manic guys named Jack (three times, not including Stacee Jaxx in Rock of Ages) who are all good at approximately the same thing.
Love him or hate him, the Mission: Impossible franchise just wants you to care enough to watch Cruise be Cruise, forever and irrevocably linked to its producer and star’s public image. In between M:I movies, you’ve likely forgotten that this superspy who is good at running motorcycles has a name (Ethan Hunt) due to his unparalleled blandness as a character. But immediately after viewing the most recent entry, Rogue Nation, the first thing you’ll do is post about the stunts and Cruise’s infectious insanity.
The film opens with the IMF team in Bulgaria on a mission to remove a crate of weapons from a plane. What begins as a computer glitch ends with Hunt literally holding on to the plane as it takes off—in what is possibly one of the most psychotic moments ever intentionally captured on film—with Cruise strapped to it. However, the derring-do of the IMF has begun to turn heads back home, where CIA Director Alan Hunley succeeds in folding the agency into his own, leaving Hunt alone in the field as a fugitive from justice to solve the mystery of the nefarious Syndicate.
Yes, the plane scene from the ads happens right away. Refreshingly, it’s not the most intense set piece in Rogue Nation, which is a toss-up between the stealth operation in an opera house and a (literally) breathless underwater sequence that tops everything previous in the series’ 19-year history. Gripping as these moments are, director Christopher McQuarrie—recruited by Cruise after collaborating on Jack Reacher—appears content to leave things on auto pilot for scenes not involving motorcycles or knife fights. The lifeless jokes are rightly entrusted to Simon Pegg but are never exactly funny, the villains are creepy yet never feel close to actually winning, and too often a thrilling motorcycle chase ends with predictable bad-guys-can’t-shoot-straight BS.
McQuarrie’s worst offense, however, comes in his depiction of Ilsa Faust, excellently portrayed by The White Queen’s Rebecca Ferguson. Faust is well-conceived as a deep character with a more compelling story than any of the bros at IMF, yet McQuarrie seems to think that nothing about her is quite as interesting as how her butt looks when she gets on a bike, what kind of underwear she’s wearing as she swings from the rafters in a ballgown, or what her sideboob looks like as she changes out of a wetsuit. Worse yet, Ilsa was the only character’s name I could remember without looking it up, yet the conclusion makes it clear we’re unlikely to see her again in future installments.
The movie is not bad, and at its best is likely worth the price of admission. But like most Cruise vehicles, it succeeds or fails on how much you like Tom himself. His PR machine would like us to see him as an American Jackie Chan or modern-day Harold Lloyd, willing to put his life in danger for his art. But for many people, he’s more like emo magician David Blaine; you might personally hate him, but you endure his shtick because he’s the best at what he does.
Playing this week
Ant-man
Inside Out
Jurassic World
Mr. Holmes
Minions
Paper Towns
Pixels
Southpaw
Trainwreck
Vacation
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213
