Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

In the sixth Mission: Impossible, producer/star Tom Cruise re-teams with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, with whom he made the underrated Jack Reacher three years before. Cruise and his producing partners (longtime agent Paula Wagner for the first three movies and J. J. Abrams' Bad Robot team for the past two) turn the M:I series over to a new director for each subsequent sequel in the hopes of bringing fresh life into the franchise. Unfortunately, McQuarrie (writer of The Usual Suspects and co-writer on the Cruise pictures Valkyrie and Edge of Tomorrow) does little more with the opportunity than create a watchable summer blockbuster, delivering the required elements in a flashy but disposable fashion.

As with the other M:I films, Rogue Nation's screenplay amounts to little more than a nonsensical framework upon which a skilled director should be able to hang a few memorable set pieces. There are three beautifully designed sequences in McQuarrie's movie, but none as memorable as the famous ceiling drop of the first picture, directed by Brian De Palma, or the Burj Khalifa tower episode of the previous installment, Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol, the best Mission: Impossible yet. The lack of inspired action is especially disappointing because McQuarrie demonstrated a surprising flair for staging inventive fight scenes on an intimate scale in Jack Reacher.

Cruise, as always, comes through with his age-defying combination of boundless energy and inexhaustible determination to entertain an audience, which once again translates seamlessly to his character Ethan Hunt's relentless drive to save the world. An overused Simon Pegg and an underused Ving Rhames return as the IMF team members who give Cruise (and the movie) support and comic relief, while Jeremy Renner and Alec Baldwin portray banal suits that anyone could play. Sean Harris distinguishes himself as the principal villain—a rogue MI6 agent named Solomon Lane who runs an international criminal consortium called the Syndicate. But the film's biggest asset is Swedish newcomer Rebecca Ferguson as the British undercover agent with whom Cruise and company team up. As in so many recent Cruise vehicles, his female co-star is not a romantic partner, yet the chemistry between the two actors and their characters is tangibly charged. Ferguson makes this picture worth seeing rather than skipping.