Kritiken

A sinuous series of set-pieces that never bogs down in exposition. Tom Cruise gets stranger and more robotic each year, but the Mission: Impossible series keeps improving. I was particularly impressed with the assassination games during the opera, a complex minuet of overlapping POVs that provides one of the many tense standoffs between Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson... Ferguson slinks away with the movie, her lithe athleticism perfect for the film's clockwork mechanisms.

Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie settles on an aesthetic that fits in somewhere between the workmanlike anonymity of J.J. Abrams's Mission: Impossible III and the graceful comic precision of Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. McQuarrie is a wittier, more volatile director than Abrams, and though he lacks Bird's formal ingenuity, he brings a certain rough-hewn panache to the proceedings.

Comic relief is everywhere, an aspect of franchise engineering where McQuarrie seems to have gone with the flow. Nothing in Rogue Nation feels as abject as the bit in Ghost Protocol when Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg disguised themselves as a corridor, but the jokes are still a drag.

There's a Rube Goldberg-like precision to the narrative that I appreciate; at heart it's about getting one guy out of a box and another guy into one. And I really don't mind that the biggest action scenes are at the beginning and the middle. We get enough of that ginormous-to-ginormousest build in Hollywood movies that I'm happy to have a climax with real people running around darkened back-alleys.

...For sheer symphonic intensity, that scene could stand with Mad Max: Fury Road, the summer's other popcorn-movie miracle. The rest isn't quite on that level – more prosaic, and a bit exhausting – but it's very solid. The film is shrewd, and intricately written; it's also funny.

The overall dazzle of the execution is offset by cursory plotting and leaden dialogue, which is disappointing from McQuarrie, who wrote the deathless The Usual Suspects. Without the wit of its previous installment, M:I–RN feels a bit of an endurance championship, although if you're in it for the action alone, you won't feel shortchanged.

It's entirely possible to watch and enjoy this movie as one that just so happens to star Cruise. There's wit and style, and the action sequences never hit the same note twice. The director and credited screenwriter is Christopher McQuarrie, whose previous movie, Jack Reacher, also starred Cruise and was the worst time I had at the theater in 2012. Rogue Nation is almost good enough to induce amnesia.

The fifth film in a franchise might not sound like the place to go for directorial personality, but Christopher McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is a surprising exception... The visual expression of its ideas remains consistent with the formal style established in McQuarrie's previous work: a robust use of the anamorphic frame, vivid colors and film grain (both Jack Reacher and Rogue Nation were shot on 35mm), gliding camera movement, and a sparing use of close-ups and coverage.

Tonally, this is a different experience from the last one, "Ghost Protocol," which felt like an immense machine, or contraption, with each line and shot building into a self-contained sequence: a touch of Buster Keaton. This one feels like it could've been a movie by Keaton's most fervent disciple, Jackie Chan, who gifted the human race with the likes of "Project A" and "Supercop." It has a loose, hurtling quality. Despite all the bone-breaking violence, its touch is light.

Sleek and bloated, specific and generic, "Rogue Nation" is pretty much like most of the "Impossible" movies in that it's an immense machine that Mr. McQuarrie, after tinkering and oiling, has cranked up again and set humming with twists and turns, global trotting and gadgets, a crack supporting cast and a hard-working star.

It's not that after 20 years, five directors and as many missions these films have nothing new to offer... but in this instance writer/director Christopher McQuarrie fails to resolve the identity crisis from which Brad Bird's 2011 entry, Ghost Protocol, suffered. McQuarrie invites us to judge his film next to other high-octane modern actioners, but it's hard to compare it to anything other than previous Mission: Impossible films.

The [action] scenes offer a visceral kick, thanks to the franchise's dedication to bending the limits of human potential, which innately channel's its star's thoroughgoing fixation on forcing the impossible to maintain a shred of plausibility. Rogue Nation doesn't need the meta text about chance and skill to keep audiences engaged. With Cruise on board, the film is guaranteed a surfeit of subtext.