MI5 an unthinkable thrill ride

Tom Cruise sure does everything that he can to provide a solid two hours’ worth of entertainment. He can scream and run, climb down the world’s tallest tower, hang from the highest cliffs, jump, punch, and generally ‘fantastic’ his way through every obstacle. In short, his acting mission is like a To Do list for the Guinness Book of World Records.

Hang off of the side of an Airbus A400M Atlas airplane as it takes off – for real? Why not? He’s Tom ‘Crazy’ Cruise! Stuntmen are for other actors who simply haven’t mastered their bodies and minds in the incredible way that he has.

Instead of working on the emotional and psychological craft of acting, he has decided to crunch and flex his way through his scenes. In some ways this makes him more of a physical performer like Buster Keaton but absolutely not in so many other ways. Buster did so much more emoting than Cruise ever could, and with a stone face too.

It’s that same ethos of physicality that Cruise the person brings to Ethan Hunt the character … I mean the superspy who believes that no mission is impossible, only highly improbable. After all, he’s worked for the Impossible Missions Force for 20 years now and hasn’t aged a bit, although he has lost a shirt or two in the process.

In this, the fifth of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Hunt finds himself at the mercy of a ne’er-do-well enterprise ominously called The Syndicate. Despite Hunt’s superior awesomeness, this mysterious organization always seems to have the upper hand on him. IMF is in bad ways already, what with CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) pleading with the Senate to close down the renegade band of highly-effective misfits. Inconceivable!

That means that things are bad all over. Thank golly goodness that our hero has Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) to help along with making things right again.

In their way are Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), the sinister creep behind the international criminal consortium bent on breaking ‘the system,’ and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a former MI6 agent who may or may not be on his side. Or not. Maybe.

If she reappears in the sixth M:I movie then I can think of a great tagline – M:I6 vs MI6. Perhaps only a word person like me finds that terribly funny.

Full disclosure: it’s important to note that I am a huge sucker for these kinds of tub-of-popcorn flicks. There’s action, there’s ridiculous stunts and fighting, tension, the possibility of imminent disaster, and the ultimate redemption of the hero via wit and wile. It’s really like James Bond for teenagers, except this is 100-times better than the last James Bond movie, Skyfall.

That being said, Charlie’s Angels is still 100-times better than this overwrought exaggeration. It’s exactly the same movie but it’s more fun because it embraces its silliness with both arms.

Mission: Impossible is really a throwback to a bygone era of pseudo-serious American entertainment that strove to prove itself against England’s own superspy. The differences are few between the two nowadays. They both get gadgets a-plenty, the intercontinental landscape is as scenic as scenic gets, the plots are just as convoluted and indecipherable as a corn maze at midnight, and everything else is possibly the most impossible to believe.

There are knives, guns and bombs. There’s a fight scene at the Vienna Opera during a performance. There are planes, motorcycles and fast cars with incredible computers that make OnStar look like Lite-Brite. These people have mobile phones that do so many things like scan fingerprints and retinas that it makes me wonder what kind of plan they have. Seriously. Do they even text any more, or is everything video conference from a jail cell or the middle of a mountain tunnel? I want that phone.

Despite the absurdity and all, despite Tom Cruise’s Tom Cruise-ness, I’m still a sucker for every impossible mission that can be thrown at the Impossible Missions Force in these Mission: Impossible movies. They’re fun, way larger than life, and utterly, utterly stupid. Check your IQ at the door, folks. It’s the ideal summer blockbuster fare to shut your brain off, prep for some cinematic endorphins, and repeat the addictive theme song out loud: “Dun, Dun-Dun, Dun, Dun-Dun, do-do-doooo, do-do-dooo, doo-doo!” Too much fun, I’m telling you.