McQuarrie: Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015)

Although Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was praised for its extravagant set pieces, the Mission Impossible franchise has always had a particular affinity for set pieces, like the series before it, just as the formal challenge posed to the films has always really turned on how to translate that set piece structure into a feature-length narrative without making it feel like three TV episodes stitched together back to back. The situation is made considerably more difficult by the fact that the original and secondary series treated the set piece as a tool for taking us to the very threshold of the analog, physical world, as well as the threshold of the nation-state – a threshold that has greatly receded in the intervening decades, such that the murky, interstitial, post-national zones that were only ever horizons in the series are now simply taken for granted in the world that Ethan Hunt inhabits, a world in which stealth is no longer a specialisation but a general state of mind. In Ghost Protocol, Bird responded with a series of dizzying, vertiginous, incomprehensible post-spaces, all prevented from lapsing over into digital exhaustion by the analog, physical presence of Cruise’s body, the body of the last great actor prepared to perform his own stunts. Rogue Nation, by contrast, stays along that threshold instead of leaping over it, embracing the murkiness between analog and digital space that seems to define so much contemporary experience, which is perhaps why it also feels more interested in suspense than spectacle of the kind so sublimely expounded by Bird. In that sense, the film feels like a bit of a pretext for its central set-piece, which occupies most of the second act, and revolves around Hunt’s efforts to foil an assassination attempt that has been deliberately timed to occur during the climactic note of a performance of Turandot at the Vienna State Opera. Moving between virtually every component, inhabitant and network within the theatre, McQuarrie crafts a kind of tribute to The Man Who Knew Too Much that effortlessly glides between post-human sightlines and the palpably plastic, artificial spatiality of sets and costumes, with a deftness and dexterity for co-ordinating real-time, real-space imperatives with a digital space of flows that is, in the end what Hunt does best, not least because this picaresque, porous membrane is also a fairly absurd space, and a great backdrop for Cruise’s exquisite sense of comic timing. And that’s only exacerbated by the presence of Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust – another undercover agent and one of the best foils in the series – as well as by Christopher McQuarrie as writer and director, whose vision of Cruise in Jack Reacher as the only great action hero who hasn’t succumbed to self-ironisation – even or especially at his most comic and camp – is continued here with aplomb. Of course, there’s a story to undercut it all – as in Ghost Protocol, the twist is that something like a nation-state or at least a nation-syndicate does still exist – but the main emotional thrust of the film is a kind of paean to Cruise’s ability to age with dignity onscreen, in a kind of counter-narrative to that promulgated by the tabloid media. Earnestness tinged with just enough comic charisma to prevent it sinking over into saccharine sanctimony is a fairly rare commodity for an action hero these days, but Cruise has stuck to his guns with a conviction in the power and passion of acting even as his offscreen reputations – and misrepresentations - have forced him to fall back upon serial and genre roles as never before, which is perhaps why the Mission Impossible franchise has gradually morphed into one of the best contemporary tributes to cinema as an actorly medium, especially in this sort-of sequel to Jack Reacher. Certainly, all of the action scenes feel like workouts at some point, while Cruise - and Hunt - are just starting to glimpse the twilight of their acting careers, but that just makes their dedicated professionalism all the more endearing, all the more of a spectacle in itself, especially when coaxed, cushioned and curated as perfectly as McQuarrie has over the course of these two collaborations.