Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Saw this a couple days ago, fun times, little spoiler though, very little nation happening, lots of rogues though, possibly enough to make up for it.

It seems like the formula for a good action movie is pretty complicated, especially if you want to keep it from being dark. You need high stakes, over the top action, actors who can actually pull off a characters you care about, and you also need to avoid seeming callous, so you can't kill off dozens of innocent people and then immediately go to a joke line. Movies like The Fast and the Furious fail miserably at the last part, with car chases that probably end up doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage, and result in the death of dozens of cops and innocent bystanders, the protagonists in that franchise are quite literally irredeemable criminals and should rightly be in jail. The Michael Bay Transformers franchise falls into this as well, with the stakes being high, and civilian deaths running into the thousands, yet he makes the choice to intersperse all that with scenes of racist illiterate robots, or human characters making dick jokes.
A franchise like the James Bond films with Daniel Craig embrace that, with a titular character who knows the consequences of his actions, knows he is kinda reprehensible, but makes that quip anyway, and keeps on going, that is sort of the point of the series and it is very good at it, the difference is the Bond films make no effort to glorify it or the characters who act like that stuff. However it is not a lighthearted summer romp, it's going for a different angle and definitely falls into dark territory.

Mission Impossible manages to walk the tightrope pretty well, this isn't going to blow you away with revolutionary film making techniques, nor do the actors wring every ounce of drama possible from the script, they don't have to though, it isn't that kind of film.
We have very complicated and cool action set pieces surrounding the pretty much required heist scene that most of the MI films seem to have. Tom Cruise is a crazy person and I wouldn't really want him over for dinner, but the man has charisma and clearly loves his work, while his supporting cast does a fine job backing him up, Simon Pegg is particularly notable, pulling off a performance that shows he actually has some acting chops beyond just being the comedy guy. I mean, we knew that already, but it is nice to see him keep showing it off.

The plot centers around finding the thingy, the enemy needs the thingy, the good guys need to keep him from getting it, the thingy is somewhere no one can get it, so the good guys must steal it from that place. From all that we get the usual round  of backstabbing, theft, and betrayal, you get the requisite amount of false face use, another requirement with the franchise, and everyone gets their chance to be smugly superior and talk for too long about how they are totally gonna win you guys, like totally for sure this time.

It's good fun and I recommend it, this won't go down in history as the best film of the summer, in fact after a year we all may have forgotten it existed, but there are certainly a lot worse ways to spend ten bucks an an afternoon.

Oh, the green screen is really bad though, I don't know what they were thinking letting that be the final cut.