I thought it was the best action/spy movie in the last 10 years, since Casino Royale. Definitely better than all the previous Mission: Impossibles. It had a really retro style to it without a lot of crazy camera angles, fast editing, extreme violence or characters acting all cool and stone-faced. Cruise and the others poked fun at themselves, much like the Indiana Jones series did. The use of exotic locations and focus on drawn-out sequences of suspense was reminiscent of Hitchcock classics like North by Northwest. The stunts are also apparently done for real in most cases by the real actors themselves, most notably Cruise hanging off the side of the airplane at the beginning. This was done in the classic Bond tradition of cooking up great stunt sequences and writing a movie around them, but the writing didn’t take any shortcuts.
It was written for an adult, intelligence audience. They gave you all the information you needed to understand the plot but they didn’t repeat it fifty times for dumbed-down members of the audience. They went through the key details there pretty quick so you get rewarded for paying attention. The characters themselves are written as extremely intelligent, so it becomes difficult to predict how they are going to double-cross and outsmart each other, making it very interesting to watch. It never feels like the movie’s cheating or taking shortcuts. Everything that happens stays true to its own logic and they’re careful to cover up potential plot holes with lines of dialogue that explain why things have to happen the way they do. The story is smart enough to make the most key action scenes more complex than simply ending when one character out-shoots and out-punches the other one.
The actors did an exceptionally good job. Even Alec Baldwin works in the movie because he plays a basically unlikable character who is stubbornly difficult to reason with. Cruise is intense where appropriate and gets in the kind of lighthearted comedic moments like Harrison Ford used to do in Indiana Jones. Simon Pegg is effective as the everyman sidekick character who provides comic relief without being over-the-top about it. The villain gives an understated, quieter, colder performance without any distracting flamboyance. And Rebecca Ferguson is a luminous discovery, a classical European beauty with a confident intensity in her eyes that makes her believable as a super-spy.
Every Mission: Impossible sequel has changed directors from the previous one and also cast a different female lead. The studio appears to recognize what they had with this one and are breaking that tradition by bringing back both the same director and female lead for the next movie in the series.
Why was I pinged to this?