In the last couple of years, Tom Cruise has made a smart detective film, “Jack Reacher,” that made no money, plus a smart sci-fi film, “Edge of Tomorrow,” that made no money. “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” is a sigh of defeat. Now Tom’s only goal is to give us a kickboxing fight or a motorcycle chase every eight minutes, and hope for the best.
Neither bad enough to be a complete waste of time nor good enough to remember past next Tuesday, the film co-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie staples together one routine action piece after another with cutesy dialogue and lots of merciless pounding away at iPad screens.
The IMF (Impossible Mission Force) is in trouble with the CIA boss (Alec Baldwin) who wants to shut them down for chasing after what he believes is a fictitious international terror force dubbed the Syndicate that foments disaster worldwide: Blame them for plane crashes, civil wars and maybe even the script for “Jupiter Ascending.”
To unravel the Syndicate, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his IMF team (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Ving Rhames) will have to go off-grid (are they ever on-grid?) in search of, ultimately, a bank statement. This can be obtained only by diving into an underwater chamber to switch out a data card because, I guess, sensitive electronics gear works optimally under 10 billion gallons of H20 and also because diving scenes are cool.
Especially if we know that Ethan will have to hold his breath under the wet stuff for three solid minutes, if all goes perfectly, which, of course, it will not. Is there a super-spy trick to this? No, McQuarrie simply has Ethan be superhuman. Holding onto a flying jet with his fingertips at hundreds of miles an hour? No problem. Walking away from a 100-mph motorcycle wipeout? Yawn. Ethan even suffers brain damage at one point, then shakes it off like it’s a gin and tonic.
Superman thinks this guy is boringly infallible.
But even Superman had a girlfriend. Cruise seems to have given up on trying to convince us that he’s a ladies’ man and with the female lead — a fellow spy (Rebecca Ferguson) of uncertain loyalty — he shares no moment sexier than a warm hug of the quality you’d give your aunt at Thanksgiving. Lacking much character except (like everyone else here) expertise at all things, she is on hand only to check the box marked, “Strong, assertive, female.” It would make no difference within the movie if she perished at the hands of the Syndicate’s creepy chief, Lane (Sean Harris). Naming her Ilsa and having her hang out in Casablanca brings up the kinds of comparisons that can only be labeled unfortunate.
“Rogue Nation,” the kind of movie where trained assassins with machine guns miss our hero from a distance of five yards, has the occasional semi-rousing moment, but it has neither the wit of the best Bond films nor the grit of any of the Bourne ones. It’s a movie that never lives up to the promise of its own theme song.