I'm going to call him Tom Cruise during the rest of this review of "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation" because even though his character has a name, Ethan Hunt, it is really Tom Cruise who makes his entrance clambering over a hill and exhorting his lovable tech guy Benji (Simon Pegg) to use his hacking skill to open the door of a cargo transport plane that's about to take off with a belly full of nukes stolen by Chechen separatists or something, I don't know who they are, it doesn't matter, Tom Cruise is running, arms and legs pumping, hair flying, and holy mother of moley he's climbing onto the top of the plane and hanging to its underbelly as it takes off, with his bare hands!
I forgot to say that Tom Cruise works for the International Monetary Fund, sorry, the Impossible Mission Force (they keep saying "IMF," it's confusing). The plot? Fine, the plot: CIA director Alec Baldwin wants to disband the IMF. He believes Tom’s people are just a bunch of mavericks, meatheads too impulsive to send to Top Gun. “Your unorthodox methods are indistinguishable from chance,” a government official tells them, “and your results, perfect or not, look suspiciously like luck.” So the IMF is disbanded, over the objections of Tom Cruise’s buddy and fellow butt-kicking super-agent William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), who I guess is his superior, and—I have no idea what happened in this movie. Something about Spectre, or Hydra, or The Syndicate. Yes, that’s it, the Syndicate, a group comprised of rogue agents who are sneaking all around the world blowing things up and killing heads of state and destroying major companies and taking candy away from little kids on Halloween, too! Just swooping down out of the sky, on jet packs, and stealing their candy! OK, they didn’t do that last thing. But they did everything else on the list. These are really bad people! There could not be a worse time to tell Tom Cruise, “Hey, you stink, you can’t save the world anymore.”
Tom Cruise gets knocked around in this film even more brutally than in the last one. He gets captured by some of these Syndicate people and hung by his wrists in a dank makeshift cell and beaten by a goon known as Janik “Bone Doctor” Vinter (Jens Hultén). He dives into a centrifuge chamber full of water to re-key a security system so that Benji can sneak into the top-secret data storage base above, and reprogram the something or other so that they can do that thing and get the thumb drive and breach the firewall, or something. Only Tom Cruise can go into the water chamber because you have to be able to hold your breath for three minutes and seriously, who can do that besides Tom Cruise?
