The grammar primer's fifth instalment is the fourth best, ranking behind the beautiful De Palma confection in first place, Brad Bird's rollicking cartoon in second and JJ Abram's vicious, elevated-by-Philip Seymour Hoffman third entry in third. Woo's whiffy second entry, which now seems a lot more fun then it did at the time, remains in last position.
But they don't exist in a steep curve from excellent to crap. All five are of a high standard for this sort of whizz-bang-pop PG summer action confection. The franchise is helped by the fact that a different director takes on each entry, resulting in a new flavour every time, from De Palma's taut, balletic staging to Woo's hollow melodrama and slo-mo absurdity, from Abram's chaotic, verite paranoia to Brad Bird's live action Incredible's comedy and cartoonish stunts.
McQuarrie might have been expected to bring a bit of that seedier, more grounded street-level action seen in the under appreciated Jack Reacher, but instead the film is a bit of a grab-bag of styles (because who the hell wants a grounded Mission: Impossible film?). The results are mixed.
The stand-out sequence is a taut assassination attempt with multiple shooters poised around an opera house as Cruise tries to silently take them all out. Did McQuarrie watch the similarly-excellent opera scene in Quantum of Solace (also the highlight in that film)? There's something about theatre-set suspense that works well on-screen. Watching a theatre audience triggers a Pavlovian response in the cinema audience. We experience a disproportionate concern that the performance will be disrupted. See also the rollicking, grand guinol Grand Piano.
Cruise is also great. I've always been a fan. Say what you will about his cult membership, he is a movie star and he is not lazy. Ironically, he never cruises. Tom Effort would have been a more appropriate stage name. It's a quality that's more and more recognised now. I wondered if the film's opening was a knowing nod to the memes that have built up of Cruise sprinting, which he seems to do in every film, always with maximum effort writ across his beautiful brow, because as soon as the movie opens he's off, dashing like a dog let slip - inexplicably in a suit, like he's run straight from his running scene in The Firm.
Cruise is great in this. The shift in his attitude in the first film (which is now, unbelievably, almost 20 years old), where he accepts each sure-to-be-fatal task with a confident swagger, to this one, where he sighs and resigns himself to the next insane battering, is a good one.
Rebecca Ferguson, the putative but unconsummated love interest, is also good. Unlike Cruise, who like a true movie star plays himself (albeit to perfection), Ferguson is enigmatic. She's also interesting to watch, she's strong without being Hollywood's traditional version of female strong (boring leather-clad robot) and she does a neat jumping leg strangle.
Less successful is an action sequence underwater, because it looked too much like a computer game to me.
One interesting feature of this entry, which I'm not sure I like, is the winking at the audience. At one point the bad guy talks about Cruise in abstract terms as a manifestation of destiny itself. Several times the team's descriptions to one another of the latest bizarrely unique sequence of locks they have to break through verges on parody. Though I guess each heist has to involve doing something visually spectacular that hasn't been seen before, so it will get pretty ridiculous (M:I 19: "the only way in is through the guts of a crow, so we'll have to shrink you, and it will explode if it detects that you have lungs, so we will have to remove your lungs").
The increased involvement of Simon Pegg broke the fourth wall for me. I couldn't stop imagining how Pegg must have been pinching himself constantly as he shared scenes with Tom fecking Cruise. His mugging is a bit much, but I suppose the franchise is aiming to replicate a team feel.
That team dynamic is a telling return to the television set-up of M:I. Back in '96, Cruise was a massive opener, the biggest star in the world, and the M:I rights were used to give him and only him an action role. So the film opened with the rest of the team being promptly killed off. Now, Cruise isn't so robust at pulling in the crowds by himslf (a pity: I'm sentimental and weirdly protective about the Cruister's movie star status, plus he clearly likes to be liked, plus Edge of Tomorrow is tremendous) and the Fast & Furious films have shown the box office benefit of an action family. Hence the somewhat awkward appearance of Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames, crowbarred in but no-one knowing quite what to do with them. It can't help but feel like a bit of a cynical imposition. Ethan Hunt is a fair weather friend, I would say (the less said about his here-today, gone-tomorrow wife the better).
But it's still a good solid blockbuster.
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