Chalk up another successful globe-trotting adventure for Tom Cruise! I admire this series a lot as they take their time to head back into another installment and that’s paid off almost every time.  2011’s Ghost Protocol brought Mission: Impossible to new and fantastic heights, so Rogue Nation has a lot to live up to. While I think Ghost is the superior movie, Rogue Nation is no slouch.

Rogue Nation is the fifth movie in 19 years, but looking at Tom Cruise then and now, you’d never know it. 2011’s Ghost Protocol brought Mission Impossible to new and fantastic heights and much of Rogue Nation picks up on that. Right out of the gate we’re given a great opening action scene with Tom Cruise again planting his action movie stunt flag as Ethan Hunt hanging on to the side of an airplane. That brings us all back into this world of espionage, tech gadgets, and double crosses.

Ethan Hunt has had the sneaking suspicion that a rogue organization called The Syndicate has been manipulating events around the world for their own twisted gains. While he’s had no real concrete proof for some time, The Syndicate makes its presence known to Ethan in a brutal face to face in London.

From there, we’re scrambling around the globe with Hunt and the rest of the IMF team to stop The Syndicate from killing any more innocent people. There’s a lot to like in this two-hour adventure starting with the cast. Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Jeremy Renner  return as Benji, Luther, and Will respectively. These guys are IMF with Tom Cruise and their chemistry has never been better. You can tell these movies are a blast to make just by watching them interact. Their conversations are great and the humor perfectly placed and executed. Alec Baldwin holds it down again as Alan Hunley, the authority figure to this group of good guys. I was completely blown away by Rebecca Ferguson, who plays Ilsa Faust, the female version of Ethan Hunt who works for the bad guys (or does she!?). She’s perfectly cast as the femme fatale. I loved every scene she’s in, a great actor and stands toe to toe in every action scene. Speaking of which….

Rogue Nation sports some serious action set pieces. The opening with the plane, a great interrogation scene, an opera battle for the ages, a heist, and one of the best vehicular chase scenes in quite some time.  All of which work so well thanks large in part to director Christopher McQuarrie (he wrote it too!). The guy has a real eye for action and everything is superbly laid out. The opera scene, in particular, has many moving pieces, but it’s staged, shot and edited so well, that it never gets confusing. With five people in motion (not including the target and a full-blown opera being performed) it’s a real achievement. I’m especially impressed with the BMW M3/Motorcycle chase in Morocco. How close and smartly placed you are to everything is really remarkable. There are shots where you are just hauling ass right next to the bikes, but it doesn’t look like it’s shot with a GoPro stuck to the side of the machine (which everyone does now). It’s like you are flying right next to them, it’s incredibly visceral, a remarkable thing to witness on the big screen.

The whole movie is beautiful from start to finish. Sumptuous locations, gorgeous cinematography (look up Robert Elswit, his resume is insane), excellent CG integration. Props to the costume designer  too, Isla’s yellow dress for the opera is a show stopper. A ton of  high quality behind the camera talent worked on this movie.

With all that good, I’ll get to the weak parts. The main antagonist, Solomon Lane, is first. Sean Harris plays the part and he does well with what he’s given, it’s just that his motivations are too half-baked. He’s an expert manipulator, we get to see that quite a bit. But everything else about him is rather nebulous. There’s I think two scenes devoted to exposition for his character and motivations. We’re really just told about it and not shown. A “Six Months Later” card near the beginning leap frogs a lot, Hunt has figured out most of The Syndicate. We never get to see the detective work, how he puts these things together, it’s all just done and presented with nice a nice computer presentation (if Powerpoint could do something that pretty, people would be psyched to go to meetings). A twisted sense of revenge is laid out for Solomon and you just have to take it at that. He comes off as a very two-dimensional villain, a problem a lot of movies have now.

It also feels like there’s no actual danger for IMF no matter what happens. What’s the point of using screen time to cut the team of its support and resources from the US government when it literally doesn’t affect them at all (a plot point made even more redundant since it was used in the last movie)? Hunt gets one scene of throwing his CIA pursuers off his trail and that’s the last of them. IMF freely travels the globe and still has access to top of the line gear that would make James Bond envious.

Sure, they’re put in crazy and dangerous situations but where is the risk when everyone comes through with barely a scratch? For example, Benji and Hunt get into a car wreck that would have snapped their necks like a wishbone in a car crash. Hunt then continues the chase on a motorcycle only to somehow manage not to get his flesh flayed off like Polly-O string cheese when he dumps his bike doing 90mph. He lays on the ground for a but with some dirt on him, but I don’t think they even bothered to rip his clothes! Sure these are movie tropes, but I’d like to see at least some common sense put into things (no one working at the power plant saw Isla and Hunt parachuting into the complex?).

Rogue Nation does a lot more right than wrong and is ultimately a good way to spend two hours of your time. They need to mix things up again for the next one (no more threats to shut down IMF, beef up the antagonist, maybe kill a major character…), but Mission: Impossible is one of the best action franchises going, so the potential for another winner is well at hand. I just hope to see Isla Faust again.