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M:I Month: Mission: Impossible -Rogue Nation (2015)


Christopher McQuarrie is a writer first. He made his name in the industry on his Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Usual Suspects and became a reliable script doctor over the next several years. In 2008 he wrote a movie I quite liked by a filmmaker I will not speak of called Valkyrie, which starred Tom Cruise. And some spark must have been lit between the two because McQuarrie subsequently made his mainstream Hollywood directing debut with Jack Reacher, and thereafter followed Cruise in some capacity or another on most of his movies, usually as a writer, though in the case of the fifth Mission: Impossible movie, director as well.
One could see this as Cruise simply playing favourites with a friend, but McQuarrie makes for a surprisingly good fit. Rogue Nation in some ways is a perfect Mission: Impossible amalgam that translates the core of the series’ appeal. It plays in the classic spy movie conspiracy stuff that the first film did well, while maintaining the action standards and general tone established by Ghost Protocol. And it does new things too, like amping up Hunt’s intensity both in the mission and in his determination, and introducing a femme fatale to stir up the stakes and emotional investment.
Rogue Nation hits the ground running, opening on what I recall was the most hyped action stunt of the film: Cruise hanging onto the side of an Airbus as it takes off, trying to get in through a door that needs to be opened remotely. It’s a terrific sequence as Hunt communicates desperately in midair with his team trying to get him inside, for him to then get in, strap himself to the cargo they are tasked with recovering and take off via parachute as the film cuts to titles that are probably the best variation the series has come up with so far. The energy of that cold open is never quite recaptured afterwards, but McQuarrie manages to solidly hold onto your investment.
As hinted at by the end of the last movie, Rogue Nation concerns and refers to an organization called the Syndicate -made up of rogue field agents from various intelligence organizations around the world. Benji refers to it as an anti-IMF, and honestly it’s about time the Mission: Impossible series got its’ own SPECTRE. The Syndicate is seemingly led by an ex-MI6 agent Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) whose vendetta of terrorism aims to topple the current world order -classic evil spy stuff.
Hunt is captured by Lane early on, where we meet his persistent frenemy for the rest of the movie: Ilsa Faust, played by a sharply enigmatic Rebecca Ferguson, who frees him. Ilsa successively injects a new flavour of spontaneity into the series; seductive but not in any way a love interest, empathetic and complex in her aims, and an equal to Cruise in terms of her action movie prowess. She is a Syndicate agent, but with no loyalties to Lane, cautious of allying with Hunt’s team but clearly a great fit there. As she shows up in Vienna, in Casablanca, and finally London, crossing and double-crossing the heroes, she makes for one of the best parts of the movie.
Meanwhile, ‘Rogue’ in the title might also refer to Hunt himself, once more acting outside of IMF jurisdiction, which has been dissolved and appropriated into the CIA under Alec Baldwin, who is now seeking to bring him in through an uncooperative Brandt. And it feels a touch familiar, but importantly not derivative. McQuarrie has clearly been a fan of this series, he shows it enough so in his reference points. He understands that Hunt operating outside the system (as he’s done in three of four movies) is more thrilling, especially now that he has his loyal band of Brandt, Benji, and Luther to back him up (no word of what happened to Carter sadly). McQuarrie does a fine job incorporating this new family dynamic Hunt’s team has, using them to great effect for the movies’ sense of character and fun, while also establishing them as valuable people to Hunt personally -especially when Benji gets captured as a hostage in the last act. Benji once again is the sweet heart of the movie, an audience surrogate loyal to Hunt and yet capable in his own right as a field agent. And Pegg and Cruise have developed a smart rapport that really works.
These kind of things make a difference for a movie with what feels like a lower cadence of action. One of the downsides of playing its’ biggest stunt early and in a context largely divorced from the plot is that Rogue Nation doesn’t maintain quite the consistent sense of spectacle its’ predecessor did. The standout action beats in the plot proper are a submerged sequence in some hydro power facility where Hunt has to replace a data file, and a really damn cool car and motorcycle chase shortly following. This isn’t to say that the action is bad though, in fact McQuarrie directs his individual action scenes with a lot of competence, the Vienna and London fight sequences especially. But they can feel a touch ordinary for this series in terms of their scope and choreography. This time around it is actually the plottting that drives the thrills into the climax.
Hunt’s obsession with the Syndicate, and with Lane in particular, is where the energy seems to be more focused and more successful. It’s a different, even dangerous facet of the character that we haven’t been exposed to before, and both McQuarrie and Cruise do a good job building up his compulsion so that when the two do meet, with the lives of Hunt’s friends in the balance, it is exceptionally intense -reminiscent of the third movie but without the Bush-era torture imagery or the raging terror of Philip Seymour Hoffman. That said, Harris makes for a good villain, cold and sinister and methodical -if underwritten in lieu of his narrative significance.
Importantly, he’s going to be back -the first villain in this series not to be killed off. It’s just one of the ways in which McQuarrie shows he is thinking beyond this movie, while not relegating it to simply setting up future installments. He proves his mettle on Rogue Nation, which I like a lot for how it threads well its’ needle of maintaining the series’ spirit whilst building it out in interesting ways.
Next week, we see if McQuarrie can continue that, and conclude this series with its’ most recent and possibly most acclaimed entry, 2018’s Mission: Impossible -Fallout.

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