Pretty much every action beat works in this movie, every suspenseful scene is suspenseful, and the plot is twists and smart without being confusing (or at least confusing for long). I was really pleased to realize I was having a lot of tense fun (and keyword: fun) during a great assassination duel/show down at an opera… which does turn into a clever action scene. I was surprised to realize how thrilling I thought a motorcycle chase was… you think you’ve seen every chase scene in a spy flick before but then one surprised you… not by being original, but by being well filmed.
And, to be honest, a little because Tom Cruise is doing a lot of his own stunts (as you’ve no-doubt heard). But there’s one thing to see the sequence of him outside the airplane because that was in the trailers, all over the marketing, and Cruise has talked about it in interviews. But it’s another thing to watch the actors on super bikes, really leaning hard into long curves to the point where they have a shot of Cruise (without visible protective gear), lean a little too much and scrape his knee. It’s a fast shot and I doubt it was planned (or if it was, good on them for making it seem incidental).
But it’s not all cruise… there’s a lady spy in this who is just amazing. The actress is Rebecca Ferguson (who is the first name in Google predictive search when you type in Rebecca right now) and she plays a spy who is on every level as good at her job as Cruise is at his. There’s no namby-pampy good-for-a-lady stuff here… she kicks ass, she’s smart, and she’s critical to the story. This is a star making performance.
Plus she’s sexy in her yellow gown slit up her leg, with an assassin’s sniper rifle resting on her knee. Not to be too sexist… except that’s the character (and it’s not like Tom Cruise isn’t incidentally shirtless and buff as hell at 53 or anything).
If there’s any complaints about the movie, it’s that the villain is a bad, bad man… but primarily only because Ethan Hunt tells us he’s a bad bad man. We’re told and its inferred that he’s basically Ethan Hunt only a bad guy but he doesn’t do enough on screen to really justify his reputation.
That and the title Rogue Nation feels like they had a title before they had a movie. But whatever… they can declare the anti-IMF agency they are going after a rogue nation and I’ll just shrug and go on with it.
So, yeah, this is a pretty great film. Not the best movie of the year but really up there. I was impressed by the quality of the action scenes, the stunts, and more impressed by how suspenseful and twisty it was. And, hey, it’s really funny too. I say check it out.
Score: 88