For reasons best not explained most of the critical community is giving high-fives to Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (Paramount, 7.31). Many of them are capitulating because they don’t want to seem like cranky, ivory-tower soreheads or because they genuinely don’t mind that big-scale Hollywood films have all but given up on the concept of serious action realism — that the action genre has devolved into the aesthetic of Grand Theft Auto cyborg cartoons, and that one of the last action thrillers to really re-set the realm was Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men. That movie set a super-high action bar for the 21st Century, and 98% of the summer popcorn actioners made in its wake have rigorously avoided trying to match or top it.
Yes, MI:5 is a much more complex and “likable” film than James Wan‘s Furious 7, and to be fair it has a wondrously thrilling beginning (the much-hyped, real-deal scene in which Tom Cruise‘s Ethan Hunt hangs on to the side of an ascending airplane) and an amusing, relatively satisfying final 25 minutes. But most of it, directed and written by Chris McQuarrie, is, like Furious 7 and unfortunately unlike McQuarrie and Cruise’s smaller scale but much more believable Jack Reacher, a cyborg actioner — a running, chasing and confronting thriller made for people who despise genuine, real-deal action flicks and prefer, instead, the comfort of cranked-up digital delirium.
Call me stubborn but I want the real thing, and there are very few traces of that precious substance in MI:5. No sense of gravity or threat — no anchor, no limits, no rules, nothing but cold calculation. (Except for that wonderful hanging onto the plane thing — I could watch that scene over and over.) In a nod to Jacques Tati MI:5 could be retitled Tom Cruise’s Playtime, and for many people this is exactly what makes a good action film these days, which is to say a sense of totally slick escapist wankery from start to finish.