The trick with pop spy-movie blockbusters, like the Mission: Impossible films, is to tell stories about American spies in exotic locales fighting threats to American security without making the stories political. If you’re adapting a John le Carré novel, maybe you get away with points about affairs of state. But with 2015’s Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, you have to avoid whatever might limit the audience, or might take viewers out of the movie-watching trance.
Rogue Nation, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is a particularly interesting case. When you hear the title, you might think of presidential speeches and foreign-policy problems. But in the context of this movie, it’s a feint. The title means less than it says, or at least means something different than it suggests.
The plot sees Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) on the run from an evil organization called the Syndicate, a collection of former spies who’ve formed their own “rogue nation” under the leadership of master spy Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). Meanwhile, the CIA’s shut down the Impossible Missions Force, and suspect Hunt of concocting the Syndicate as part of a treasonous plan. Hunt, along with a collection of allies from earlier films and femme fatale Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) must clear his name by ending the Syndicate and capturing Lane.
The plot’s more coherent than most Mission: Impossible movies, and the set-pieces are supremely effective. Most notable is a sequence in an opera house, similar to but not derivative of the opera scene in the 2008 James Bond film Quantum Of Solace. It’s a scene that lets McQuarrie show off real skill with editing, sound design, and film grammar, making a mini-movie with its own narrative and tension.
The rest of the film holds up as well, though. On its own terms as an action blockbuster, this is one of the best entries in the series, possibly second only to Brian De Palma’s franchise-launching first Mission: Impossible. McQuarrie has a good eye for interesting shots and striking sets, but crucially character comes across more effectively than usual—and credit here goes to the supporting actors, notably Simon Pegg, who finds a surprising emotional core to a role as Hunt’s teammate and friend.
The movie also works well as a Mission: Impossible story, with fake-outs and people who turn out to be other people in masks and questions about who’s really manipulating whom. If your film has to have a mysterious villain with an almost-supernatural ability to manipulate people, then hiring the writer of The Usual Suspects to write and direct is a good strategy. It pays off here.
McQuarrie satisfies the expectations for what Hollywood insists on calling “reveals,” and for the kinds of reveals you get in Mission: Impossible movies. He also manages to make a movie about spies without any specific American political ideology. Some of that’s accomplished by making the British MI6 carry certain load-bearing parts of the plot. But some of it’s by portraying spies, even superspies, as ideology-free professionals.
The Syndicate are bad guys because they want to crash the system of global order. A few years on from the movie’s release, there’s an argument that one of America’s two major political parties is doing that exact thing, but here the way the Syndicate goes about things involves a different kind of violence against people the audience cares about. There’s no empathizing with the Syndicate, no speculation about whether they’re right in their aims, or why they have those aims.
On one level, that’s fair. The Syndicate are more focused on the destruction of the old than the creation of the new; they don’t articulate an ideology of what should replace the current order. The movie also makes the main driver of the plot the acquisition of a large amount of money for undisclosed reasons—if not the revelation that the terrorists in Die Hard are just thieves, it’s close.
Hunt’s fought traitors in his organization in three out of the previous four movies; here he fights traitors from across a range of international spy agencies. And the final plot twists reveal that the Syndicate started as an op planned as a government initiative. You could take away from that the idea that governments create their own monsters. But you can also see a theme in the film about the nature of trust and treason, and the omnipresence of betrayal in the espionage world.
That sounds bleak, but it anchors the explosions and excitement in just enough world-weariness to give the action some weight and character heft. It also justifies the exclusion of ideology: in the end, the political’s personal.
The paradox of film blockbusters is they focus on a relatively small cast and their interactions—here that’s Hunt, Ilsa, a couple of Hunt’s team members, Alec Baldwin as the director of the CIA, two guys in the British government—but set that drama against a background of expensive things blowing up in glamorous parts of the world. Rogue Nation pulls off that trick, understanding that character is what makes the rest of it into a story and not just a series of cool moments.
McQuarrie’s not as stylish as Brian de Palma; few directors are. But this Mission Impossible is the closest to the first one of any of the sequels, in atmosphere and tension. It’s a good tale with hints of something on its mind, even if that’s something other than the title suggests.