Review Roundup: Tom Cruise is Back in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, marks the return of franchise star Tom Cruise, who also executive produces for Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions. J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot returns as producer. Rebecca Ferguson co-stars.

In the newest storyline, Ethan (Cruise) and team take on their most difficult mission yet, eliminating the Syndicate, an international rogue organization who is committed to destroying the IMF.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION stars Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, and Sean Harris.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: Clearly Mr. McQuarrie and his star feel the need to stamp the series with seriousness, something that Mr. De Palma knew better than to do. And throughout "Rogue Nation," you can sense the filmmakers comfortably, at times awkwardly, playing tug of war with the mood, which grows SINISTER with the excellent Sean Harris as the regulation evil genius and almost frisky with Alec Baldwin as an intelligence blowhard and Tom Hollander as a political boob. Mr. Pegg's second-banana flair is especially crucial here because it helps show that Mr. Cruise, whose smile at times seems awfully strained these days, can still take a ribbing as well as a licking.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Cruise is back in action for the fifth time, and no worse for wear, in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. The director is Christopher McQuarrie, who cooked up something moody and intense with Cruise in 2012's Jack Reacher. But McQuarrie has never worked on this huge a scale, and the strain to go big and bigger sometimes shows. The movie begins with Ethan hanging from the side of an Airbus A400M cargo plane during takeoff. Why? That kind of question is irrelevant in a franchise in which action trumps logic at every turn. And yet, McQuarrie - an Oscar winner for his script for 1995's The Usual Suspects - has an ace to play. That's the indie sensibility he brings to the usual Hollywood FX. Don't get me wrong. Rogue Nation doesn't skimp on the wow factor, especially a Moroccan motorcycle chase and an underwater sequence that has Ethan whooshing around like a sock during spin cycle.

Justin Chang, Variety: But whatever the filmmaking may lack in visual or visceral impact, McQuarrie (whose past collaborations with Cruise include directing "Jack Reacher" and scripting "Edge of Tomorrow") more than compensates on the written front; his screenplay (based on a story conceived with Drew Pearce) achieves an admirable complexity without sacrificing COHERENCE in the process. On the face of it, "Rogue Nation" is another patchwork of Hitchcockian tropes and James Bondian cliches, as familiar as the recurring strains of Lalo Schifrin's classic musical theme: Carefully encrypted messages are transmitted, bank-account numbers are copied and deleted, and high-tech explosives are armed and disarmed.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: It's really just a chain of colossal action sequences that could be shown in any order. Looking back over the franchise, my reactions have ranged from enjoyment to defeated exasperation and back again. There's not a lot to chew on in McQuarrie's script here; I have happy memories of Anthony Hopkins's sarcastic drawl in M:I2: "It's not Mission: Difficult is it?" This M:I is entertaining in its schematic way; it's impossible not to respond to the theme music on a Pavlovian level. There's a sentimental attachment. But like Tom in that almighty opening plane stunt, I'm finding it harder and harder to hang on.

Kyle Smith, New York Post: "Rogue Nation," the kind of movie where trained assassins with machine guns miss our hero from a distance of five yards, has the occasional semi-rousing moment, but it has neither the wit of the best Bond films nor the grit of any of the Bourne ones. It's a movie that never lives up to the promise of its own theme song.

Stephen Whitty, New York Daily News: Tom Cruise's fun new movie features the star hanging off an airplane, walking away from car crashes and pulling off one insane stunt after another. It's almost unbelievable. But choose to accept it. Because "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation" is the perfect summer action flick. It's full of attractive people, gorgeous locations, loathsome bad guys and a pounding score that ties it all together. This is what the "Fast and Furious" movies want to be, and the Bond pictures used to.

Christopher Orr, The Atlantic: But it's Cruise who serves-almost literally-as the engine driving the movie. His performance is difficult to rate in the customary sense, because he has entered a phase in his career when "acting" seems almost tangential to his job description. There was a time when Cruise was eager to test his mettle with such fare as Born on the Fourth of July and Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia. But the challenges he's set for himself lately seem principally physical in nature, as if by hanging off planes and diving underwater he can stop his own clock from ticking into middle age. It's an exercise simultaneously triumphant and dispiriting, and there is an odd fascination in watching how much longer he can pull it off. Another Jack Reachermovie is planned, along with at least one more installment of Mission: Impossible, and Cruise has expressed interest in making sequels to EDGE OF TOMORROW and even Top Gun. Love him or hate him, Tom Cruise still has no intention of stopping.

Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly: Cruise's franchise is too valuable to Paramount to ever put that question in doubt. But like allMission: Impossible films (of which there's yet to be a dud), it's not so much about the outcome as it is the breathlessly thrilling journey Cruise takes us on to get there.

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: Although Cruise is now 53, he is very far from being a candidate for the Expendables series anytime soon. He looks great, acts with unassuming confidence without needing to ingratiate and credibly conquers innumerable physical challenges. The window between Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nationwas four years, as quick a turnaround as there's ever been between franchise entries, so at this rate it's entirely plausible that the actor could have at least one more Mission in him before Ethan retires to a desk job.

Brian Truitt, USA Today: There's not much character development involved with Ethan this time around, though you don't need it as much with all the stunts Cruise is doing. (And at 53, dude's still outstanding.) Yet his match is made in Ferguson's enigmatic Ilsa, an attractive bone-breaker of a femme fatale who looks like she stepped right off the set of a 007 adventure. Teaming her with Cruise again would be a mission impossible not to watch.

Photo Credit: Official Facebook

To post a comment, you must register and login.