Christopher McQuarrie’s entry is the most carefully built of the series so far, with a Vienna opera sequence as good as anything the genre has managed in years. The plot is a MacGuffin in a box, and the London finale runs long.
Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote The Usual Suspects, is the fifth director to take this series on, and he has looked at the four films before his and decided it is a Hitchcock picture with a larger stunt budget. Ethan Hunt hangs off a plane, is captured, is rescued by a woman he cannot read, and spends the rest of the film chasing a box while a man called Lane (Sean Harris) whispers down telephones. That is roughly the plot. It is also the best-built of the five, and for two thirds of its 131 minutes the most enjoyable.
The plane comes first, and McQuarrie has the nerve to get it out of the way. Cruise clings to the outside of an Airbus A400M while it climbs, and Robert Elswit shoots him from a camera fixed to the fuselage, so the wind drags his face sideways and the runway drops away beneath him with no cut arriving to help. We had seen the shot in the trailer and it still made our stomach turn, because there is no doubt at all that the man is out there. Then the door opens and the film moves on without pausing for applause. A lesser film would have saved it for the end and made us wait through an hour of set-up.
The Vienna sequence is where the film is best. Hunt and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) attend Turandot at the State Opera, and James D. Bissell’s catwalks and fly floors turn the theatre into a vertical maze above the audience’s heads. Elswit lights the stage gold and everything above it near black, so the assassins are shapes against the glow. Joe Kraemer folds Puccini into his own score and lets the aria’s climax do the work of a countdown, and Eddie Hamilton cuts between the singer, three guns and Cruise working out which one to stop with a clarity most action editors have given up on. Joanna Johnston puts Rebecca Ferguson in a yellow dress that can be seen from the gods, which is the point, and Ferguson takes off her heels before she fights. We sat forward for the whole ten minutes and did not sit back until it was over.
Ferguson is the film’s discovery. Ilsa Faust says every line so it can be read two ways, saves Hunt when she should not and leaves him when he needs her, and Ferguson plays her as someone who has planned for all of this and is tired. She fights like a person who has thought about it, with knees and doorframes rather than flourish. Harris gives Lane a wet, deliberate rasp and never raises it; he is a good villain because he seems to find violence tedious. Pegg gets the film’s worry and most of its jokes, Ving Rhames’s Luther Stickell turns up to be reassuring, Jeremy Renner’s William Brandt is stuck in committee rooms, and Alec Baldwin plays CIA director Alan Hunley as a man enjoying being wrong. Tom Hollander and Simon McBurney do dependable British work in suits.
The trouble is the box. The Syndicate wants a ledger, the ledger is in a red case, the case is in a vault under water in Morocco, and the film asks us to care about the paperwork. We did not. The vault itself is fine: Bissell builds it as a spinning drum full of water, Elswit shoots it in a green-blue murk and the rule is simple, one breath, three minutes, no air. The motorcycle chase that follows is fast and easy to read. But it is the third set piece in ninety minutes, and when the film returns to London for its last half hour it is mostly people in rooms explaining the plan to each other. Hamilton’s rhythm, so exact in Vienna, loosens. We looked at our watch, and then felt slightly ungrateful for doing so. There are 131 minutes here and about 115 of story.
Ghost Protocol (2011) had the Burj Khalifa and a plot that fell apart if you touched it. Rogue Nation has fewer landmarks and a story that holds, and it is the first of these films to give Hunt an opponent rather than a series of obstacles. McQuarrie also writes the running joke of the series into the script, that Hunt is not so much skilled as impossibly lucky, and then has the sense not to pick at it.
See it for Vienna first, for Ferguson second and for the plane third, which is not the order the trailer would have you expect. It carries a 12A.
