Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sit back and have fun

Rebecca Ferguson and Tom Cruise

There is something ineffably pleasing about watching people doing the sort of thing for which they have a supreme talent. Messi playing football, for example, or Domingo singing, or Astaire dancing, are so good that the only appropriate response is often to smile in wonder.

To that list I would also add the sheer unadulterated pleasure of watching a big studio movie in which everyone is at the top of their game. It’s a perfect marriage of creativity, commerce, and primarily sheer entertainment. That may be why I spent most of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation with a smile on my face. As a piece of adventure movie-making it is ridiculously pleasing.

I know it is very easy taking pot shots at Tom Cruise and heaven knows I’ve done enough of that in my time, but as a movie star and leading man he has few equals. He is undoubtedly the biggest star in the world and, on screen at least, he wears it fairly lightly. I cannot think of another actor who could pull off the role of Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series with as much style or guile as Cruise.

There’s a moment near the start of this film where an impressionable young contact is slightly overawed at meeting Hunt. ‘You’re really him’, she says. Cruise’s non-verbal response is one of the many grace notes that he brings to the role he was born to play. It betokens a confidence that is shot through every aspect of this film.

Whether it is Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay and direction, Robert Elswit’s superb cinematography, Eddie Hamilton’s cutting, or the immaculately constructed cast this is a film that is designed to thrill from first to last. Much has been made of Cruise strapped to a plane for the opening sequence, which you would need to have been living in a cave not to have seen, but this is possibly the least of the film’s spectacular set pieces. It is a mere amuse bouche for a menu of top quality mayhem.

I won’t dwell at length on the plot because it’s not really important. There’s a criminal organisation out to destroy the Impossible Missions Force, and a superbly sinister mastermind played by Sean Harris who may be the one man Hunt cannot beat. All of this is the frame on which to hang some superb action sequences.

The charm of the later entries in the Mission: Impossible series is their link to the spirit of the original TV show. The show was a product of the Sixties spy boom and ever since J.J. Abrams came on board the films have channelled the spirit of that show. At a time when Bond has gone for grim and gritty, Ethan Hunt and his cohort are having fun.

Where they have taken a leaf out of Bond’s book is in the use of what Ian Fleming referred to as ‘thrilling cities’. In their Sixties heyday when the world was a bigger place Bond films relished exotic locales and this film takes a leaf out of that book. Vienna and London are the backdrop for major action set pieces while Casablanca plays host to one of the best car/motorcycle chases in recent years.

Whatever the location we know that Ethan Hunt will always escape; no death trap is ever enough to finally put paid to him, and that is part of the fun. He is more than human but not quite superhuman; the scene after that thrilling car chase when Hunt attempts a Starsky and Hutch car bonnet slide is another of those grace notes that humanises the character.

What is extremely gratifying however is the way he is frequently unmanned by the latest member of the team, Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust. She is the sort of kick-ass heroine who makes the Avengers Natasha Romanoff seem positively matronly. She is the sort of strong female character we need to see in films like this and the story makes no concessions to her gender. We avoid the sort of shoehorning in of an unlikely romance and instead she and Hunt are respectful equals.

We are left in no doubt that these two might meet up again further down the road when Ethan and the IMF get back together. I for one can’t wait.