- UK release: July 2015
- Director: Christopher McQuarrie · Writers: Christopher McQuarrie; Drew Pearce
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; Skydance; Bad Robot
- Genre: Espionage action thriller · Runtime: 131 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Tom Cruise (Top Gun, Minority Report) as Ethan Hunt; Rebecca Ferguson (The White Queen) as Ilsa Faust; Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) as Benji Dunn; Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, The Avengers) as William Brandt; Sean Harris (Prometheus) as Solomon Lane; Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction) as Luther Stickell
- IMDb: 7.4 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 93% critics / 87% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Five films in, the Mission: Impossible series has become an unusual thing in the modern blockbuster landscape: a franchise with no fixed house style, that hands each entry to a different director and lets him make the film his own. Brian De Palma made a paranoid Hitchcock puzzle, John Woo made an operatic shoot-out, J.J. Abrams brought television urgency, and Brad Bird turned Ghost Protocol into a globe-trotting machine of set-pieces. Now Christopher McQuarrie steps up, the writer of The Usual Suspects and Cruise’s collaborator on Jack Reacher, and the question hanging over Rogue Nation is whether a man known for tight, talky thrillers can run a tentpole this size. He can, and the surprise is how much restraint he brings to it.
The setup
The IMF has been shut down, folded into the CIA by a sceptical director who regards Ethan Hunt as a one-man liability. Hunt, cut loose and operating without sanction, is chasing the Syndicate, a shadow organisation of supposedly dead intelligence officers who have turned their training on the agencies that made them. The trail runs through Vienna, Casablanca and London, and through Ilsa Faust, a British agent whose loyalties never quite resolve and who may be working every side of the board at once. The plot is built less on twists than on a single sustained question: who, exactly, is Ilsa working for, and how long can Hunt keep trusting someone he cannot read.
The cast
Cruise does what Cruise has done for two decades, throwing himself at the camera with a commitment that still reads as slightly unhinged, and the film opens with him clinging to the outside of an aircraft as it takes off, a stunt the marketing has understandably refused to shut up about. But the performance that the film belongs to is Rebecca Ferguson’s. Ilsa Faust is the best character the series has produced: capable, watchful, and genuinely unknowable, a match for Hunt rather than a prize for him. Ferguson plays her with a stillness that makes every scene a negotiation. Simon Pegg has grown from comic relief into Hunt’s actual partner, and the film trusts Benji with real jeopardy. Sean Harris makes Solomon Lane a soft-spoken, asthmatic kind of menace, the first Mission villain in a while who feels like a deliberate inversion of Hunt rather than a generic arms dealer.
The craft
McQuarrie shoots action you can follow. That sounds like faint praise and is meant as the opposite: in a decade of shaky-cam and over-cut mayhem, Rogue Nation stages its big sequences with clean geometry and lets you understand where everyone is and what is at stake. The Vienna opera house set-piece is the standout, a long, patient sequence built on crosscutting and sightlines that owes more to The Man Who Knew Too Much than to any recent action film, and the underwater vault break-in plays as a single held breath. Robert Elswit’s cinematography gives the European locations real texture, and Joe Kraemer’s score leans into Lalo Schifrin’s original themes with proper orchestral weight rather than the usual percussion wallpaper. The film runs a touch over two hours and earns it.
How it stacks up
The natural comparison is Ghost Protocol, and the two films pull in different directions. Bird’s entry was the lighter, more gadget-driven thrill ride, hung on the Burj Khalifa climb; McQuarrie’s is cooler, more plotted, more interested in its antagonist and its femme fatale than in pure spectacle. Against the wider field, Rogue Nation is the most Bond-like Mission yet, and it arrives as a quiet rebuke to the Bond films it resembles: a tighter villain than Spectre would manage, a stronger female lead than the series usually allows, and a clearer head for action than most of its rivals. It is also the entry that establishes the series’s late-period identity, the one where the stunts become the brand and the supporting team becomes a genuine ensemble.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been close to unanimous, sitting at 93%, with most of the praise going to McQuarrie’s control, the practical stunt work and Ferguson’s arrival. Audiences are a little behind at 87%, which feels about right: this is a film built to satisfy rather than astonish, and a few viewers want their summer action louder and dumber than this. I am closer to the critics. The things I value in genre work are all here, intelligent plotting, espionage craft, a strong sense of place, and an action style that respects the audience’s eyes, and the film delivers them without ever feeling pleased with itself.
Verdict
This is a confident, grown-up action film that knows precisely what it is doing. The plot is more functional than ingenious, and Lane is a fraction underused for a villain this well conceived, but those are small complaints against a film this clean and this rewatchable. Ferguson alone would lift it; the opera sequence and the aircraft stunt seal it. The series has found a director who can hold the whole thing together, and a co-lead worth building the next one around. It is the kind of action film I will happily put on again, which for this genre is the highest compliment I have. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX. A 3D conversion was considered and dropped; see it flat, on the largest screen you can find.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: McQuarrie stayed on for Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018), the first time a director has returned to the series, and built directly on the foundations laid here, bringing back Ilsa, Lane and the whole ensemble. Ferguson’s Faust has since become a fixture of the franchise. Rogue Nation now reads as the pivot point where the series settled into its modern form, with Cruise’s escalating practical stunts as the headline act. It is widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Paramount+ depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence (the home entertainment release is rated 12). The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are several crunchy fight scenes, featuring blows being delivered. Some scenes involve knives. People are shot although little is seen in terms of blood or injury detail. A man falls and it is implied he is impaled.
Threat and horror: There are frequent intense action sequences, including fights and a motorcycle chase. Restrained people are threatened with interrogation.
Language: There is some mild bad language, including ‘shit’.
Sex: There are some mild verbal sex references.
Injury detail: There is limited sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
Alcohol and smoking: Adult characters drink alcohol.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
