One of the many talents of Tom Cruise is the ability to elevate a ho-hum movie format into a goodie box of creative surprises. It’s like they’re telling the audience, “You think that’s cool?” And then, it delivers.
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“Mission Impossible 5: Rogue Nation”, which cost $150 million to film will be opening not only in the U.S.at the start of the weekend, but in 40 other global markets, including the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, and Mexico. The screenplay is as clever, exciting and action-packed as you would expect from a “Mission: Impossible” movie, involving spies, exotic locals and ridiculously high stakes.
The sixth film is likely scheduled to hit theaters in 2017, with less time between movies than there had been when the franchise first launched in 1996, followed by “Mission Impossible II” four years later, and “Mission Impossible III” six years after that. As he digs deeper into the mystery, Hunt is branded a fugitive and his Impossible Mission Force team is disbanded. Simple, compact, and maybe slightly underwhelming.
Making a successful action movie franchise based on a 1960s TV show is challenging. Each piece serves a very distinct, but also entertaining, purpose. In the sections below, we will look at what we know so far.
Her eyes shining with intelligence, Ferguson is a performing equal to Cruise. He’s a ball of lightning, or as Alec Baldwin’s Central Intelligence Agency Director character in Rogue Nation describes him, “the literal manifestation of destiny”.
Along the way, he is joined by his old members including IT expert Benji, played by a hilarious Simon Pegg, and an enigmatic female agent named Ilsa, played by Rebecca Ferguson. Each of those actors does a great job with their role, whether that means being heroic, menacing, amusing or annoying.
“As a filmmaker, it is nice to sit back and dream of these things”. The 53-year-old actor does most of the stunts seen throughout the Mission: Impossible series.
The fourth Mission, director Brad Bird’s 2011 Ghost Protocol, left me fully convinced that the then-15-year-old franchise had bested all previous missions, in the process setting a nigh-insurmountable bar for whatever was coming next.
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The film hit local theaters on Thursday. I just couldn’t hold it in. This formula is brilliantly simple, doesn’t require much back-and-forth, and lets Cruise do what he does best: tear through each film like a bullet before viewers have time to question how demented his character seems to be. Not many, but Rogue Nation does just that. Having the fourth film in the series turn out to be the best of the bunch is damn near unheard of.
