Cruise control

Tom Cruise, the Hollywood hero, may misstep from time to time, but he still plays to his strengths at the box office.

You gotta wonder if there’s something to that Church of Scientology when Tom Cruise can actually hold his breath underwater for six minutes — reportedly after training with a dive specialist — to step into the action role of Ethan Hunt for the latest Mission Impossible entry, Rogue Nation.

At age 53, Mr. Cruise is unnaturally fit, tanned, not a gray hair in sight. He rides motorcycles at 45-degree angles with apparent ease. He hangs off moving airplanes at 3,000 feet. You’d expect Cruise, at his age, to be doing the Danny Glover thing from Lethal Weapon. You know, shaking his head grumpily when he’s called out on another case and muttering: “I’m getting too old for this s**t.”

Not Tom. Apparently committed to living forever, he has no problem revisiting the role that has, arguably, kept him a viable box office fixture beyond the many controversies surrounding his life and career. Oscar may elude him, but he can still slide down a zip-wire like the best of them.

And this may be the thing Cruise was ultimately meant to do. By focusing on the physicality of his Mission Impossible role, he’s driven to outdo himself with each sequel. This time, holding his breath for three minutes underwater to switch out a secured hard drive — though we hear from his publicists he can actually hold his for six. (I tried matching this feat in the cinema with my iPhone’s stopwatch running and bailed after 55 seconds.)

Okay, so the press is that Cruise is still physically fit. But is the franchise still in tip-top shape? This is number five, and director Christopher McQuarrie lays on the gritty, saturated-color feel that has marked the series since Brian De Palma began it all in grandiose, not-too-subtle fashion in 1996. The other bit of press reminds us that this franchise has grossed $2 billion since it began, which seems like pretty savvy marketing and producing by Tom Cruise. (All this press is possibly meant to counteract bad press from last year’s HBO documentary on Scientology called Going Clear that painted Cruise in a pretty bad light, allegedly having the church wiretap Nicole Kidman’s cell phones and such.) The Hollywood hero may misstep from time to time, but he still plays to his strengths at the box office.

He’s gathered back a regular crew that includes Ving Rhames (returning as hacker Stickell in this fifth outing), plus newly acquired IMF members Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and, for comic relief, Benji (Simon Pegg). (It must be pleasing to Pegg, the smart, funny Brit, to have managed to insert himself into just about every iconic Hollywood action/sci-fi franchise reboot, from Star Trek to Star Wars to Mission Impossible.)

Renner goes from Bourne Legacy star to second banana here, though it does seem to be the addition of new blood that has revitalized the action series.

As per usual, there’s an attractive female on hand (Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust) who may be playing both sides of the fence, but Hunt can’t seem to give up on her. With a slight hint of a young Jacqueline Bisset, Ferguson plays an MI6 agent who may, or may not, be working with an evildoer named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris, best remembered as intense goth rocker Ian Curtis in Control) who’s apparently setting up his own “rogue nation” — an evil axis of bent leaders, bent on terrorizing the rest of the world into capitulation.

None of this plot stuff is particularly necessary to understand or enjoy Rogue Nation. You are invited to leave your brain elsewhere, out in the lobby perhaps, as the Mission Impossible movies function as a series of action set pieces, meant to kick the MacGuffin down the road long enough to set up the next action sequence. And so on.

Mostly it’s good cinematic fun, especially when Hunt and Benji are sent to a Vienna opera house to stop an assassin from taking out the Austrian chancellor (and are caught in a three-way rifle circle jerk), or when Cruise, as mentioned, must survive inside a water tank much longer than most humans could manage and his facial muscles expand outward to improbable proportions. There are bits of humor involving cloak-and-dagger types such as Alec Baldwin (playing CIA director Alan Hunley), Tom Hollander as a clueless British prime minister and Simon McBurnee as weasel-ish MI6 director Attlee.

If it all seems a bit by-the-numbers, well, it is: Mission Impossible scripts tend to never really go too far off the reservation, though this one and the last, Ghost Protocol, introduced an IMF that was dipping below the radar, leaving Hunt a fugitive by the end.

Here, IMF’s powers and budget have been cut, by Congressional order, and its members folded into the CIA, where Brandt works (reluctantly) for Hunley. Hunt is now being hunted, but of course, the gang all meet up again, with or without the mandate of the US government, to bring down Lane before he gains access to… to… well, I don’t really remember what it was exactly, but something to do with files on a flash drive concealed inside Ilsa’s lipstick, so it must have been pretty important.

The notion of double and triple agents still has resonance in the real world, especially in a world full of Snowdens and Wikileaks and Scientology — people working all the angles all the time. The script, by McQuarrie and Drew Pearce, plays off of this paranoid fixation: she could be working for Lane, but then again maybe she’s only pretending to work for Lane; or perhaps she’s only pretending to work for MI6… It’s always fun to see screenwriters trying to stump the audience, along with its characters. This Cold War-style of chess playing still has its storytelling uses, and Mission Impossible is the perfect franchise for keeping the “Who can you trust?” fires burning.