I Watch Films: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

IMF agent Ethan Hunt intercepts a cargo of nerve gas and goes to a rendezvous in a London record shop for a briefing on his next mission. However it has been compromised; a mocking version of the classic Mission: Impossible briefing plays, introducing The Syndicate, an international network of rogue agents from various spy agencies, before gassing him while his contact is killed.

Following on from the events of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol the CIA director gets the IMF closed down. Luther Stickell resigns, Benji Dunn and William Brandt transfer to the CIA where they are under close watch, put on the find Ethan Hunt mission. Hunt meanwhile escapes from The Syndicate with the aid of MI6 double agent Ilsa Faust.

Six months later Benji wins tickets to see Turandot in Vienna; this has been arranged by Hunt who is tracking the blond man who he saw from the record shop booth. Also attending the opera is the Chancellor of Austria and several members of The Syndicate including Ilsa Faust. They prevent an assassination, Hunt and Faust escaping together, only for the Chancellor to be killed with a car bomb. Benji and Hunt let Faust go to preserve her cover. The CIA director blames Hunt and Benji for the assassination and orders them killed or captured. Brandt convinces Stickell to help him find them before the CIA kill them.

Benji and Hunt follow Ilsa to Casablanca. The blond man is Soloman Lane, a former MI6 agent. He’s in Casablanca because there is an impregnable vault, underwater at a power station. In the vault is a digital ledger with files on all The Syndicate agents. They break into the impregnable vault, but Ilsa escapes with the ledger to London. There she turns the ledger over to the MI6 chief, Atlee; he deletes the ledger and orders her back undercover.

Benji has taken a copy of the ledger but it’s a biometrically encrypted digital red box that will only open if the British Prime Minister provides authorisation. They infiltrate a fancy party and learn that The Syndicate was a British plan designed by Atlee to create a secret off-the-books organisation, but the PM shut it down. The ledger also has details of secret accounts with £2.4 billion that Lane wants to fund The Syndicate.

Hunt goes to confront Lane, only to discover it’s yet another trap, with Benji wired up with sound and vision and having a bomb attached to him, while in a crowded café, opposite Ilsa. Hunt, having destroyed the ledger, claims only he has the details on how to access the money. With 2.4 billion reasons to not kill him, Lane defuses the bomb and lets Benji go, setting the stage for a final chase/fight/duel of wits.

For all it’s clever reversals and high concept ideas, as well as excellent stunts and setpieces, this doesn’t feel especially satisfying to me. Have I seen all these bits before? The double agent we don’t know we can trust? The impregnable vault getting weirder and more dangerous? The team now has two hackers, which is one more than needed, as well as Jeremy Renner’s Brandt, brought in as a mirror image of Hunt in the last film. The Syndicate isn’t a bad idea – all these former agents brought together as a mercenary army for hire. But it feels like it should have been in the 90s, in the aftermath of the Cold War. Impossible to raise the stakes over Ghost Protocol, where the villain wants to start a nuclear war, they sidestep this as a problem by having the Chancellor of Austria killed and bringing the British Prime Minister into play. Again, a clever way to keep things fresh but unsatisfying.

Watch This: Clever, exciting spy thriller
Don’t Watch This: Violent, unpleasant, uses female characters weirdly