From Avengers: Age of Ultron to Mad Max: Fury Road and Fantastic Four, more than a few franchises are going a few shades darker in an attempt to entice more moviegoers, but not Mission: Impossible. The espionage franchise’s fifth entry hits screens at the end of next month, and from the looks of the trailers, Ethan Hunt and company are back for another rollicking adventure just as audacious, amusing and adrenaline-fueled as their last.
In Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the IMF is disbanded by a bureaucrat (Alec Baldwin) tired of the agency’s high-profile antics, leaving Hunt (Tom Cruise), Benji (Simon Pegg), Brandt (Jeremy Renner), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and the mysterious Ilsa Faust (franchise newcomer Rebecca Ferguson) with no backup and little other than their wits to rely on as they race against time to prove the existence of a shadowy organization of assassins known only as The Syndicate.
That’s all well and good, but the trailer shows us what this movie is really about – Tom Cruise jumping near-certain death beneath 70,000 gallons of pressured water, Tom Cruise driving a car backward through city streets, Tom Cruise engaging in a motorcycle shootout, Tom Cruise clinging to the side of a fast-climbing plane, Tom Cruise- well, you get the picture.
The Mission: Impossible franchise has always been great popcorn fare, and this Christopher McQuarrie-directed entry should prove no different. Rogue Nation (curious title – watch out for the hackers) employs the ever-reliable good-guys-versus-bad-guy-clones narrative in the IMF taking on the equally trained Syndicate while keeping the series’ trademark tongue-in-cheek dialogue, and that combination points to another wholly solid (if not exactly groundbreaking) installment in what’s one of the most well-received action franchises out there.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation explodes into theaters July 31. Opening the week after Paper Towns, Pixels and Southpaw, and directly against the Vacation reboot, it should have no problem winning its weekend.