Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

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"Join the IMF and see the world. On a screen. From a closet."

Year:	2015
Country of origin:	USA / Hong Kong / China
Director:	Christopher McQuarrie
Genre:	Action / espionage
Starring:	Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames
Rating:	5/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2381249/
Tagline:	Desperate Times. Desperate Measures.

Usually, by the time you reach the fifth instalment of a franchise, things have well and truly jumped the shark. You know how it goes; Freddy’s cracking jokes; Pinhead’s got all emo; Vin Diesel has befriended Paul Walker.
Mission: Impossible, on the other hand, is an altogether different animal.

The plot:
Following the disastrous events in Moscow from M:I 4, the IMF – Impossible Mission Force for the mouth-breathers at the back of the class – is in big trouble. On the verge of being disbanded, and with main-man operative Ethan Hunt (The Cruiser) accused of being a paranoid fantasist now gone rogue, seems things can’t get much worse.
As luck would have it, evil organisation The Syndicate has hatched a plan – destroy the IMF before the IMF destroys it – and, before you can say Limp Bizkit, the team are back in action.

Nonsense, from beginning to end.
Of course it is.
But riotously enjoyable nonsense, nonetheless.
Racing from action set-piece to stealth mission to underwater tension-a-thon, director Christopher ‘Jack Reacher’ McQuarrie hurls just about everything at the screen, sometimes all at the same time, the result being a helter-skelter, pell-mell, adrenaline soaked fun ride so cavalier, outlandish and genuinely joyous there is simply no time to think about the preposterousness of what you are seeing.
The film kicks off with Tom clinging to the side of a military cargo plane taking off, and gets more ludicrous from that point onwards and, the wonder of it all is that, far from becoming tiresome in the manner of, say, The Fast and the Furious movies, here we are swept along, delighting in the lunacy of it all.
And personality is the key to success.
Unlike the Fast films, here the viewer is compelled to actually care about the characters, each being likeable and engaging, no matter their motivations or actions. And even in this regard we have a bit of everything. Cruise, the troubled, quietly spoken hero. Ving Rhames, the muscle with attitude. Simon Pegg, the joker with brains. And, of course, Rebecca Ferguson, the multi-faceted femme fatale whose agenda is never quite clear, even as the end credits begin to roll.
The term popcorn movie is usually hurled around as an insult, of sorts, the implication being that because something is loud and brash and over-the-top it is impossible for it to be in any way sophisticated and, usually, that is the case – I’m looking at you Transformers 1, 2, 3, 4 and, I’m pretty damned certain, 5 – but M:I 5 is the exception that proves the rule.
Go see it as soon as you can.
I dare you not to have a blast.