Chess, anyone?

MI-S“Mission: Impossible- Rogue Nation” plays out like a good game of chess and winds up being the perfect summer movie.

The chess analogy fits the story: The IMF (Impossible Missions Force), headed by Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), is out to stop its direct mirror image (described in the film as the “Anti-IMF”) called the Syndicate- a government-born covert operative group whose members consist of missing, believed-dead, or disavowed agents that has gone rogue and are now a global terrorist threat. So good is the Syndicate that when Ethan goes to receive his IMF orders by playing a record in the listening booth of a London record shop, it’s the Syndicate that have made the record: its leader Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) reveals himself to Ethan and gasses the listening booth, abducting Ethan and taking him to a secure location where they can exact methods of torture to extract information.

While in the Syndicate’s clutches, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a female Syndicate operative and disavowed MI6 agent, helps Ethan escape by high-kicking and punching the other Syndicate captors with moves that are a notch-above any self-defense class. On the run from the Syndicate and also the CIA, whose director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) has promised a Senate oversight committee to disband the IMF after the stunts of their last mission (2011’s film “MI: Ghost Protocol”) resulted in partially-destroying the Kremlin and subjecting San Francisco to a potentially dangerous yet disarmed high-velocity nuclear warhead, Ethan must now find Lane and stop any future Syndicate acts of terror before Ethan is captured by the CIA. When Ethan encounters Ilsa again on the trail of Lane, he must also figure out why she helped him escape the Syndicate- are they planning to recruit Ethan now that he is disavowed?

Somehow, given this is the fifth film in the MI franchise, “Rogue Nation” maintains the slick stunts and action scenes you’ve come to expect while working really well as a spy thriller- its plot points are so well-crafted that some scenes actually generate suspense. In that respect, you can credit Christopher McQuarrie for writing and directing “Rogue Nation-” McQuarrie sets up a chess game perfectly (he won the Oscar for writing 1995’s “The Usual Suspects” and wrote the screenplay for and directed Cruise well in the underrated 2012 film “Jack Reacher”). While the pawns are lined up (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner all reprise their roles from the previous MI films), it’s the queen with all the moves and Rebecca Ferguson does an amazing job in her role as Ilsa- in a role that could have made the story less than plausible, she is every bit Cruise’s equal and shines in exuding the intelligence and toughness her character demands.

But Cruise is still ‘king’- as star and producer of the MI franchise, he’s managed to turn these films into good action movies over the 19 years since the franchise’s inception and, despite his age, still physically fits well into the lead role of Ethan. Even though he certainly doesn’t need to do his own stunts (in this film, he hangs onto a cargo plane during take-off and rides a motorcycle at 100 m.p.h,, weaving through traffic on a winding Moroccan mountain road), Cruise throws himself so far into the role that it almost seems like a death wish. However, since he’s the producer of the films, I guess he can tap dance around any production insurance bonding issues (or no one wants to mess with a high-ranking Operating Thetan- c’mon, you know I’d have to throw the Scientology angle in here somewhere).

I really enjoyed “Rogue Nation.” While some film series can become stale, the “Mission: Impossible” franchise proves, with its latest installment, that a well-plotted storyline and using actors like smartly-moved playing pieces can never produce a stalemate.

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