Acting along the mainstream, I ranked Mad Max: Fury Road as my #1 pick last year. However, I'm here to bring up what I regard as one of the most underrated action flicks of last year – Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.
Rogue Nation was indeed very well-received with a 93% at Rotten Tomatoes. However, with its thunder stolen by (the admittedly superior) Fury Road, it was quickly forgotten by the end of the year, appearing on almost nobody's year-end list and scoring few to none nominations at the awards circuit. In my opinion, if there's ever going to be a Mission: Impossible film getting near awards nominations, it's this one. Its predecessors in the franchise are all solid entries, with the excellent Brad Bird-directed Ghost Protocol, but Rogue Nation still easily outclasses all of them. It's all the more amazing that its release was pushed up front for half a year (likely helped by its reliance on practical stunt work instead of CGI).
The writing of the film is thrillingly terrible. Terrible, because the formula is very by-the-books; thrilling, because there's always a slight element of surprise in the execution. The plot is indeed nothing special – the IMF (not the International Monetary Fund) has been disbanded! There's an unlikable new director! The bad guys are from a shadowy organization which turns out to be unrealistically super powerful! It sounds like a boringly clichéd plot and is eerily similar to the James Bond entry, Spectre, from the same year (more on that later).
However, what matters is the execution. I was very worried when Christopher McQuarrie, famous for writing The Usual Suspects, was announced as the director. His directorial skills were at doubt. However, he gave us an array of scenes that were flawlessly directed. The plane. The vinyl store. Breaking into Ethan Hunt's apartment. The Opera House. The boat. The water dive. The car chase. The motorcycle chase. Liverpool Street Station. And the finale. These scenes aren't necessarily action scenes in the style of Transformers. However, they are still vividly remembered in my head for their slick execution and stunningly cinematic quality with a great sense of vision coming from McQuarrie.
Everyone's favorite – the Opera scene!
Mission: Impossible films have always been about the action set-pieces. Audiences dearly remember the memorable wire sequence from Brian De Palma's first entry, and of course the jaw-dropping Burj Khalifa sequence from Ghost Protocol. Just when everyone had been scratching their heads on how Tom Cruise (and everyone else behind the franchise) would improve on that, they gave us not one – but two – set-pieces that were not only fantastically spectacular, but also meticulously placed in the grand scheme of things. After those two set-pieces (which were deservedly hyped through relentless marketing), I kept on thinking – how on earth are they gonna top that for the third act/finale? In true spy fashion, the film gave us a classic espionage scene along with shadowy figures running through the dark streets of London in a manner reminiscent of The Third Man and other film noir classics. Instead of topping it with more spectacle, they returned to the basics, and gave us classic and rewarding entertainment. Brilliant.
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| I can't find a clip of the brilliant finale on YouTube, so a still will suffice. The still doesn't do it justice though. |
Now, I'm going to talk about Spectre, a film that completely failed that formula.
Skyfall, Spectre's critically acclaimed predecessor, uses that formula as well. In Skyfall, Silva's plot is also stupid and filled with plot holes. However, the film moves so snappily that audiences don't think about the plot holes. Combine that with set-pieces or scenes that are cinematic like Rogue Nation's (mostly due to Roger Deakins's fantastic cinematography), you have a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Spectre, in contrast, moves crazily slowly, and has no memorable set-pieces whatsoever. The problem of moving so slowly is that audiences have time to realize how stupid the plot is and how out of motivation the characters are. In contrast, the characters of Rogue Nation have clear motivations and always stick to them. The character arc of Ilsa Faust, the badass femme fatale whose motivations are unclear at first, comes to a complete circle at the end. In Spectre, the opening scene is labelled by many as the only redeeming part of the film, but all I see is pointless James-Bond-getting-into-bed-with-a-woman (this happens again AND again, in the age of political correctness!), and wrestling on a helicopter. Nothing particularly impressive. The car chase offers nothing except cars looking cool, the train fight has people questioning why Bond isn't dead yet, and the finale is simply nothing like Rogue Nation's (also set in London). The action is as un-cinematic as it gets – the glass box trick is a million times smarter and slicker than whatever Bond did to defeat the villain. The villain is built up to be oh-so-powerful but we are always TOLD not SHOWN of the mayhem he creates. The more I think about it, the more I dislike the film for its dry execution and dreadful writing.
Four minutes of pointlessness. The scene runs for ten.
The nail on the coffin is how Rogue Nation has Ilsa Faust, who is played by the scene-stealing Rebecca Ferguson and is just as charismatic and powerful as the male protagonist, while Spectre's women are only there for Bond to have sex with. This was a problem with Skyfall, and saw no improvement under Sam Mendes's direction and the same writing team's work. In short, I love the underrated Rogue Nation and my mind keeps coming back to how cinematic it is, while Spectre is something I have no interest in revisiting.