The Mission: Impossible movies want us to believe that Tom Cruise can save the world. In the new one, Rogue Nation, we’re told that the complex web spun by terrorists’ acts worldwide are attributable to one cell of expatriated super spies: the Syndicate. Then we’re told that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is the only man who can stop them. A fellow agent meets him for the first time, and she gasps as though he were Lennon to her 1960s schoolgirl. “I’ve heard the stories,” she exclaims. “They can’t all be true.” One of the jokes of Rogue Nation is that—when he flashes that woman his $200-million smile in lieu of an answer—we become believers, too.
Another joke is that even a cabal of the world’s most lethal super spies aren’t worthy opposition for Tom Cruise and his unflappable Cruiseness. So the script for Rogue—the film is written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie—kicks the apple crate out from beneath our shortest action hero even earlier: A government suit by the name of Hanley (Alec Baldwin) dissolves his black-ops gang (Cruise’s sidekicks are played by Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Jeremy Renner), leaving him with only a vaguely affiliated British secret-agent-slash-potential-traitor (Rebecca Ferguson) to help him sort the Syndicate out. Her name is Isla Faust, and he meets her while fighting his way through a performance of Turandot. “Nessun Dorma” recurs on the score through the rest of the movie. Prince Tom is on screen, at an operatic scale yet again. None shall sleep.
The sequence at the opera builds its way up to and down from eight separate cymbal crashes. McQuarrie establishes points of interest in each corner of the opulent space: There’s an Austrian head of state in one box, a trio of assassins spread across three others, Benji (Pegg) running tech support up top, and Cruise fighting his way through the backstage area—rappelling across light fixtures and swinging from showdown to showdown—trying to clear them all out. The organized chaos of the scene provides the same cathartic joy you get solving a jigsaw puzzle: The editing jumbles the pieces incoherently, then McQuarrie sorts them all out, and we’re left with a single surviving image.
And that image is one we’ll return to, time and again, throughout Rogue Nation—Cruise’s world-conquering smirk. If the movie has a topic, that face is it. We’re certainly not concerned with the political subtexts suggested by the worldwide disruptions, as they get wrapped up quicker than a cartoon cuts to commercial. It can’t be about camaraderie, because every actor here is working to prop their star up (even Baldwin’s climactic moment involves him monologuing about Cruise’s nonstopness.) And we’re certainly not here for the sex: Steamy chemistry is required to pull off the superhuman-hero-falls-for-femme-fatale thing, and Cruise—who has never flirted convincingly with any actress he wasn’t married to—can’t manage it. He stares at Ferguson with the face you give someone when you can’t hear them: He tries to seem interested, but just looks confused.
So nothing in Rogue Nation works except for Tom Cruise. But oh, how he works. The third conceptual joke of these movies is that his character can survive literally anything. But he’s a smart enough actor that—instead of leaning in to the suaveness—he expends all his energy trying to convince us otherwise. He gets into a knife fight during the opera sequence, and the look he gives when the opponent picks his blade up isn’t bravery, but exhaustion. Cruise’s dedication to doing his own stunts is often marked as a publicity gimmick, but in moments like that—and, of course, during the stunts themselves—the in-text payoff is clear: He’s one of the only movie stars honest enough to sweat while he’s on screen.
There’s another knife fight near the end of the movie, involving two characters who aren’t Tom Cruise, and you spend the whole time wondering where he is. And in that moment you realize that it’s not the action that makes these movies, but rather it’s Cruise and his weirdly specific charm, which is so well-suited to the exasperated state the stunts in these movies keep putting him in. (He’s James Bond, if James Bond were an asexual Eagle Scout.) Wesley Morris once reviewed one of these Impossible films by suggesting that Cruise was the Jesus of movie stars: “He’s the sort of messiah who’ll nail himself to the cross.” By now we’ve realized that he’s not going to save us from our sins. But when we watch scenes like the opera house shootout, and we see him on the verge of collapse, we realize he’s capable of a more moderate salvation: He can’t provide world peace, but he can still save otherwise forgettable action movies.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE—ROGUE NATION. RATED PG-13. NOW PLAYING EVERYWHERE.
