My Review of "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation"

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Score: 8/10 (I wrote this back when I was fonder of giving numerical scores)

            For a while this was my favorite movie of 2015 and if the villain had been more memorable, cut back on the adoration of Tom Cruise, get rid of the 10 words of romantic crap, and have the ending be a little different and it would have been.  None of these items are individually bad enough to sink the movie, no one of them “needs” to be fixed, but each could be fixed to elevate the movie.

            The action in “MI5” is fantastic, chases are tense and fast; the hand to hand combat feels impactful; and the buddy comedy between Simon Pegg and Tom Cruise is great (they should work together more).  I liked the female lead, she is charismatic and projects competence in what she is doing.  I liked the gadgets and jet setting around the world.  I liked nearly everything.  So now that I have pointed out the positive highlights let me flesh out my previously mentioned complaints.

The practical effects and stunts are also super fun.

            The villain is just a growling skinny guy in a suit.  His motivations for why he is doing what he is doing are never explained (yes I know WHAT he was doing, but the WHY is unclear).  He tends to kill underlings too frequently in some instances and not at other times which seems more prudent.  His first appearance shows his willingness to get his hands dirty in the field, but for most of the movie he sits in front of a laptop.  What I am saying is that he comes off inconsistent.  It doesn’t help that his actor (who I am sure is quite talented) was in “Prometheus” and that might have tainted my opinion of him.

I'm a geologist.
Sure you are sport.

           The adoration of Tom Cruise needs to be mellowed.  There is a scene in which Alec Baldwin talks for two whole paragraphs about how awesome and dangerous Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is.  It feels like something Cruise says to himself in the mirror at the end of the day as a personal pep-talk of how awesome he is.  In the movie it sounds awkward at best and it is too long.  You know what it could be shortened to?  “Ethan Hunt is a dangerous disavowed field operative who is after you, he has killed better protected people than you and infiltrated more secure locations than this.  Be afraid.”  Boom.  Done.  Less is more.

            The 10 words of romantic crap needs to be shed.  Tom Cruise is 50+, it is weird for women in their late 20's and early 30's to ask him to run away with them.  It only happens once in this movie in a scene that leaves it kind of ambiguous as to whether the offer is romantic, but it still comes off as odd.  Otherwise the female lead and Cruise have zero romantic chemistry and display zero attraction to one another.  It felt out of place.

The guns built to look like flutes and tonfas are quintessential spy gadgets.
And women wearing clothing that shows off their legs is quintessential sex appeal.
Also, the character's name is Faust.  DO YOU GET IT?

            And the ending, SPOILERS obviously.  Since the bad guys are planning to use the millions and millions of dollars in the hidden accounts to fund their own terrorist criminal activities and the US government wants to defund the IMF.  I was expecting the end of the movie to be Ethan and company using the money in the hidden accounts to fund a rogue IMF hunting down and eliminating the terrorists who had signed on to be a part of the bad guy organization.  Instead they just get reinstated by the government.

Considering how many times the IMF has been dissolved or had traitors in it, having it officially dissolved makes more sense.  And it works as a set up for the sequels.  “Mission Impossible: Freelance” sounds like a perfectly hokey title that explains exactly what they need it to.  What is more, my idea makes sense in the world.  Ethan shouldn’t want to work with the USA anymore, he has his own handpicked team, resources, an enemy, and too many reasons to resent and distrust his previous supervisors in the US.  He should want to be a white hat rather than a government triggerman.

            END SPOILERS.

Product Placement

            Let’s talk about product placement, really more to do with placement of it in movies and TV shows than anything else.  Superman slams into an IHOP in “Man of Steel”.  Dunn plays “Halo 5” at work in “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation”.  Scott Lange works at Baskin Robbins in “Ant-Man”.  And clandestine meetings happen at Denny’s, or in the parking lot of Lowe’s Hardware on “House of Cards”.  These are a few examples, but you are already thinking about the types of cars they drove on “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad”, and that episode of “30 Rock” in which Verizon is the best phone ever.  I am doing this off the top of my head and I could go on probably forever.

            Is this a bad thing?  I am going to say “No”.  And here is why.

1) In real life, as I write this, there is a can of sprite to my left, and a “Boarderlands” gaming mouse pad to my right.  You see, while lots of companies do pay to have their stuff featured to various levels… That shit does exist.  And making it part of the character’s world is not unreasonable.

            2) Movies and TV are really expensive to produce and having Coca-Cola help pay in exchange for having their brand on screen in a subtle way helps to defuse the cost and allow for more ambitious productions, I don’t know if they could afford to have Kevin Spacey murder political loose ends while soliloquizing to the audience unless the audience wanted to also clench their thirst with a Coke.

            3) From a historical and social standpoint this is nothing new.  Many of the great works of art in history and especially the great works of architecture have been commissioned by merchants and with streaming and commercial skipping technology becoming the standard way of doing things I see no other way a company can justify creating an entertainment product while at the same time telling the audience that they did so.

Really I find the inevitable outcome for this to be something like this: “Game of Thrones: Episode 55, Brought to you by Pepsi” or “Sony Presents: House of Cards”.  Companies will just become producers of material and will be part owners of it, so that people who like a particular program will have to think of the company when they watch or talk about it.

And eventually people will see it as part of the landscape, just like people used to not bat an eye at Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen having breakfast together so they could talk about cornflakes, or the Flintstones talking about cigarettes.  Marvel will perhaps have the easiest time with this, as they have been having superheroes fight bad guys over fruit pies for decades.

 

Sure this is boarder line immoral.  But at least they aren't anti-vaccers.

I mean, Superman did cigarette advertising too... But much like in "Man of Steel" it was mostly incidental destruction.

            This blog brought on by seeing “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation” a movie that I highly recommend. There is the occasional wrinkle in which I thought of how they could have done something a little different, or how they should have a gadget for such an occasion, but it is my favorite action movie of the year, beating out "Mad Max: Fury Road", "Jurassic World", "Ant-Man", and "Avengers: Age of Ultron".

I come to find out it is written and directed by the same guy who did "Jack Reacher" and has a lot of the things I liked about that movie in here too. Lots of funny dialogue, no romance subplot, a couple of great chance scenes, and a good bad guy. Unlike "Reacher" it doesn't give away the whole mystery at the start so it ends up working better on that level. Best of the series.  I will eventually give a full review of it, just like I do every other movie I see each year, but for now I must point it out as a must see for the summer.

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