I hate the Mission Impossible movies and it is important context to consider the previous 'efforts' in the series.
The first MI move seemed like a good idea. Take a classic 60's action series with clever spies who do amazing confidence tricks, add Tom Cruise, update for 1996 technology and off we go. Then they took the main hero of the 171 episode TV series, cast John Voight to play him, badly, and made him the bad guy. No amount of tricks and stunts and special effects was ever going to make up for taking such a chunk of franchise history and throwing it away. I am stunned that David Koepp still gets writing work. There must be an awful lot of Producers out there who think Carlito's Way is so great that all his other disasters are forgivable. They really are not!
The second MI movie now seemed like a bad idea but the first one made some money, so they bring in John Woo to direct and Anthony Hopkins to try and give it some weight, and manage to make an even more terrible movie than the first one!
Third time round, still cashing in, and they bring in JJ Abrams to direct it and add Phillip Seymour Hoffman for weight and Simon Pegg for laughs. Surely, this time, we get something worth watching? No, it manages to be even worse than the first two! JJ you should be ashamed that your name is on this.
Four, why am I even going to watch this? Adding Jeremy Renner and trying to make it funny and hiring one of the Pixar team to direct can't help, and yet somehow it does. This one is still bad, but it is the least bad of them all.
So now we get to the latest in the series, and the trailer looks terrible. Ridiculous stunts, bad Simon Pegg jokes, Alec Baldwin! I am four movies in to the series so giving up now would just be pointless.
I am on a bad-title binge this week (see Southpaw for more) so I am going to start with the stupidity of "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation". There isn't actually a nation involved at all, never mind a rogue one. Even when this is crammed into both the trailer and the movie it is so clearly done for effect that the whole scene seems stupid.
There are still plenty of stupid bits. The whole underwater computer nonsense was a complete waste of time. An underwater computer hidden under a power plant? He can't take any metal in with him but he has a computer on his arm? Not that it matters because most air tanks are made from glass fibre these days anyway, so he could have just got hold of some non-metallic fittings and spent as long under the water as he wanted to. Two of them break in to the factory, when only one of them has to be there, and spend several minutes repositioning a massive gantry crane and none of the staff notice? Then he runs out of air, and isn't it suddenly handy that there were two of them...? I don't mind a bit of suspension of disbelief, but part of the allure of the original MI series was that they tried to minimise that by using tricks and good planning rather than this sort of nonsense.
While I am on "stupid", consider the Austrian policeman who has a truncheon that turns into a gun so that he can sneak it past security. Ignoring both the ability of someone disguised as a policeman to bypass security, and more obviously that Austrian police are armed anyway!
Despite the stupidity of some sections, the bulk of the film is actually fairly watchable.
Rebecca Ferguson steals the entire film. Every time she steps on the screen she puts the other cast in the shade. She also brings a sensible practicality to the ridiculous spy business as she repeatedly stops to take her high-heeled shoes off when she needs to run or fight.
The stunts and fights are generally pretty well done, even when they are stupid. The overall plot is passable when you ignore the silliest parts. Switch your brain off for a couple of hours and there are certainly worse things you could do with your time.
If they do make MI6, and the money men will be keen, I will probably go and see it was well.
Overall 7 out of 10.
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