Film Review - Mission Impossible Rogue Nation (2015)

Mission Impossible Rogue Nation is the fifth film in the series and this time Chris McQuarrie takes over both screenplay and directing duties and the story here sees the IMF (Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Jeremy Renner) dissolved by the deputy director of the CIA (Alec Baldwin) but a shadowy organisation called The Syndicate threatens global peace and only the IMF can stop it.

When compared to how I felt about Terminator Genisys and Ant Man I enjoyed Rogue Nation a lot more than I did those pictures and those reasons are two:

- The first is the action set pieces McQuarrie and his team have put together, for the most part they are very exciting to watch and have a real sense of reality to them and while watching one of them in particular I thought to myself "I wish Mad Max Fury Road had this feel to it" in terms of not looking so heavily filtered as that film does whereas here there's a much more natural look to the proceedings and it makes the action and stunts feel more exciting to watch.

- The second is the IMF cast, Cruise equips himself fine here but at this point he feels more like an action windup toy to me in some places, Pegg has some nice humour moments while Renner and Rhames very much play supporting roles outside of the main action meanwhile Baldwin who I felt to be inspired casting given his role as Dr Jack Ryan in the Hunt for Red October is okay here but part of me sorely wishes he had a much larger role in the film.

But sadly however the film for me has a very big problem and that is the Syndicate itself and it feels like a very dull organisation whose figurehead just feels like a bland nobody and not in the least bit threatening while Rebecca Ferguson as the film's primary female agent just feels like a poor stand in for Emily Blunt (Cruise's co star from last year's Edge of Tomorrow) and as a result I found her pretty dull in this film.

But coming back to the villain problem I have with the film, these sort of Spy adventure stories really need a strong adversarial organisation (The Anti version of your main lead's organisation one could say) in order to really thrive and feel memorable for an audience I mean can anyone on this green Earth imagine Inspector Gadget WITHOUT Dr. Claw or his MAD Agents that would be just not worth watching frankly or indeed James Bond without SPECTRE though we already saw that and thankfully they're making a comeback with SPECTRE in November as the series hasn't quite been the same without them.

And so that was Mission Impossible Rogue Nation a fun if slightly dull and forgettable film in places and not a patch on Kingsman the Secret Service from earlier this year and TBVH you should rent that film instead of seeing this one in cinemas, 3 out of 5.