Fragility is Strength:
How Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation gets the action movie so right
Standing on its own merits, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation is an object lesson in how to make an outstanding action movie. That Mission has only now gone full-spectrum awesome on Ethan Hunt’s fifth outing makes this all the more remarkable. With the exception of Fast and The Furious I can’t recall another franchise that’s repealed the law of diminishing returns so effectively and with such unbridled energy. Here (with just one spoiler) is how Rogue Nation gets it so right.
Always let them see you bleed
This is far too obvious a thing for so many directors and producers to get so consistently and epically wrong. An action movie needs chases, explosions and spectacle, sure, but it lives or dies on how high the stakes are for its hero(es). For me the triumphs of getting this right (and the failure in getting it wrong) are perfectly encapsulated in the Die Hard franchise. From the moment the Gruber and his terrorists gatecrash the Nakatomi Christmas party with automatic gunfire and catch John McClane with his shoes off, Bruce Willis’ cop is off balance and looking anything like a hero. Of course, the stakes are high because estranged wife Holly is a hostage, but even that tension would be neutralised with extreme prejudice if McClane had been a bulletproof hero. But he’s not. Resourceful? Yes. Tough? Yippee Ki Yay, motherfucker! But impossible to kill? Not. At. All. The bleeding feet, some serious beatings and a shit ton of inelegant near misses take their toll on McClane. His fragility and the genuine belief we have, as the audience, that he’s actually exhausted bruised flesh and blood is what makes us want to care and shuffle to the edge of our seats. By the time he confronts Gruber in the vault room his appearance is shocking: he doesn’t stride in like he’s Scotchguarded against pain. Rather, he shuffles in moaning Holly’s name like a fatally wounded beast. And at his lowest possible ebb he pushes that little bit further and survives against the odds. It’s an incredible moment. Fast forward to Live Free or Die Hard, however, and the franchise has forgotten this need for us to see the hero contemplate failure (or even mortality). The McClane we rooted for is now a superman. Sure, he has the cuts and bruises painted on, but he never once acts like a man who’s one bad landing away from being snuffed out. At a stroke the tension is gone.
Everybody Hurts
Interestingly the Mission Impossible franchise (and Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt) have performed the same trajectory in reverse. Hunt in the original Mission (and the tonal misstep that was MI:II) was much more of a trad movie hero: cocky and largely Teflon-coated. A loner, too, despite his need for a team. But fast forward to Rogue Nation and while Hunt is never less than an operative at the top of his game, his fallibility is writ large. And he acts it beautifully. There’s an amazing supercut waiting to be made of Cruise’s looks of incredulity and rising panic as Benji or some other character suggests yet another impossible and practically suicidal infiltration for him to carry out. And when he gets beaten in Rogue Nation, he doesn’t just rely on the make-up artist to do the heavy lifting. [Spoiler coming]. One of the best moments in the movie comes after Hunt has drowned (he fails his mission, and is saved by Rebecca Ferguson’s incredible Ilsa Faust). Brought back to life, he and Benji have just a few moments to collect themselves before chasing after her. Cut to a classic movie-hero car-hood slide that Hunt (disorientated still) completely fluffs, landing in a heap in the foreground. It’s both funny and heartbreaking to see. He’s literally just emerged from death’s door and isn’t really fit for anything. And this moment not only defuses the tension just a notch, but simultaneously raises the stakes for the ensuing car chase because, of course, Hunt still has to drive. And this full on flirtation, not only with imminent failure, but with doubt — for most of Rogue Nation Hunt is scrambling to get a handle on the Syndicate, the shadowy (aren’t they always?) organisation he’s pursuing, let alone get the better of them — is what lifts the movie scene after scene.
GSOH
Humour is something James Bond movies so very rarely balance well (full disclosure: I love 007 movies, despite their lurching quality control). You either get Moore-era campery and Brosnan smug mugging, or you get what we have now, codifed by Sam Mendes’ humourless and (for my money) unjustifiably lionised Skyfall — a too serious to live Bond who sails perilously close to being an entertainment spoilsport. Rogue Nation (and Christopher McQuarrie’s script) gets right what I think Bond movies often get wrong: that there’s a crucial difference between humour and jokes. Quips aren’t funny: they’re forced and always feel like they’re shoehorned into scenes. What McQuarrie understands is that in tense situations people automatically use humour to defuse or lessen the pressure bearing down on them. See also the brilliantly inappropriate gallows humour you’ll witness if you ever hang out with medical staff/fire fighters. Rogue Nation is one great domino run of tense situations, alleviated (just a little) by comments, glances and exchanges that grow organically from the sphincter-clenching moment. It’s remarkably deftly done and lets the audience knuckle down with characters and follow the troughs and peaks of the narrative without once being booted out of it by a self-consciously comic ‘bit’.
Mighty Real
Ever since MI:II’s vertiginous free-climb, Tom Cruise has championed practical effects and stunts in Mission movies(highlighted by at least one showstopper per movie that he insists on performing himself). His clinging to the side of an Airbus transport plane as it takes off at the start of Rogue Nation is every bit as thrilling as it sounds, topping even his climbing on the exterior of the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol for its WTF factor. But while this sequence has literally become the poster boy for the movie, it’s far from the only instance in which practical stunts crank the tension way higher than any CGI effect ever could. Real stunts are better than CGI? Wow. I know, I know; it’s not a new point, particularly in the wake of Mad Max: Fury Road, but it’s done extremely well in Rogue Nation. Take the extended motorbike chase. In other movies this would have been floated during pre-production and likely sidelined or had the SFX kitchen sink thrown at it — helicopter gunships! Portable nukes! But not here. We’re so used to Hollywood’s more-is-more approach to action movie sequences (blame CGI for making anything possible) that it’s easy to forget that a motorbike chase is fucking exciting. Shot spectacularly (with CG embellishments no doubt, lest you think there’s no place for judicious fakery), this is peerless stuff, edited to perfection by Eddie Hamilton (X-Men First Class, Kingsman).
Co-starring Tom Cruise
Well, hardly, but while Cruise, Pegg, Rhames, and Renner have never been better, Rogue Nation is absolutely Rebecca Ferguson’s movie. With the possible exception of Gina Carano’s Mallory Kane in Steven Soderbergh’s criminally underrated Haywire, Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust is the best argument that’s hit the mainstream yet for Hollywood getting over itself and waking up to women as action heroes for everyone. It’s an argument that really ought not to have to be made in 2015, so can we just make this a thing already? The sooner we stop noticing empowered female protagonists in action movies as something unusual and remarkable, the better. Will Faust return in Mission 6? I kind of doubt it, but only because she’s deserving of so much more space than a demotion to Hunt’s associate in the next outing would give her. Will she get her own spin-off series? That would be quite something, perhaps with an Avengers-style MI/Faust team up every third movie? Hey, nothing’s impossible.
