Actually Rebecca’s character and a few bits here and there are what totally saved this film for me. I’m rather worried about the next one, afraid it’ll be all Cruise. He must be in it, of course, he’s the main character, the one we all expect to see, but it shouldn’t be just him, it should be a team effort! I’ve heard that Brandt won’t be in it but she will... let’s hope they keep it good.
It starts with the ending of a mission, where Hunt is on the field, Benji helps him with the computers, and Brandt sort of directs the operation from headquarters, in want of a better word.
Next thing, Hunt enters a music shop to get his next mission, and the girl there is rather a fan, very young and sweet, which makes it harder when she gets killed. Hunt listens to what he thinks is one of the usual recordings, but it turns out it is from the Syndicate itself, the organization he’s fighting to discover and destroy. He’s trapped into a glass cabin and sees outside a man killing the girl in front of his eyes, making sure that he sees it.
The director of the CIA Hunley is against the IMF and asks the senate committee to shut them down, and he wins, there’s nothing Brandt can do although it didn’t seem like he tried very much, since he kept saying he can’t answer the questions.
Hunt finds himself prisoner of the syndicate, with Vinter the ‘bone doctor’ ready to torture him or beat him up or whatever, and a girl who helps him escape, killing everyone but Vinter, so they can’t say that she fought them - in a way this is the most absurd thing in the movie, because Vinter must have seen her, he can’t have been unconscious all the time because Hunt kicked him...
Anyway, now Hunley has the IMF operatives working for him at the CIA but Hunt who he can’t find. Six months he’s been looking for him. Hunt is determined to find that man, and he’ll find out that he is Solomon Lane, once a member of MI6. He lures Benji to Vienna with some opera tickets (quite the character, Benji, the computer genius who wants to be a field agent, he was playing Halo before rejoicing that he got tickets to see the Turandot...). In Vienna, they find many armed people trying to attempt at the life of the Austrian Prime Minister, so Hunt injures him first so that he might be taken to safety, but it’ll be all in vain. By the way, Benji was supposed to find Lane by looking on a monitor at each one of the men attending the opera... one by one... really? Sometimes the IMF technology surprises us, he has to look one face at a time and later on Luther will track Ilsa down with only a drawing in no time. I’m sorry but the scene when he watched each face one by one was quite ridiculous.
One of the assassins was the girl who saved him: Ilsa Faust was once a MI6 agent, now undercover within the syndicate, and as a test she was sent to kill this man, but not sure they could trust her they had sent two other assassins and had also placed a bomb in his car (so he died anyway, but instead of a bullet just for him the bomb killed his wife and his security men too grrr). Hunt and Ilsa escape together (a kiss to Ilsa, she takes the high heels off for that), but then she convinces him to let her go because she must return to them to continue her mission.
Hunt wants to send Benji back to safety, but he makes a big speech about friendship and being an agent himself and insists on staying and helping him.
Hunley now is ready to kill Hunt as soon as he can, no trying to arrest him or anything, so Brandt gets worried and contacts Luther so that together they can track him down before Hunley does.
Ethan and Benji go to Casablanca to meet Ilsa, and discuss Lane’s plans. Together they work to steal some important list that Lane wants, and again Ilsa saves Ethan’s life. He was drowning and she brought him back, she probably did cpr or something, but then she hits Benji and escapes with the stolen data on a pendrive. There’s a long chase on motorbikes, when Ethan tries to reach her but also wants to help her because behind her there are syndicate members trying to shoot her. Brandt and Luther catch up with them during the chase, helping them against some enemies. When the enemies are all out and it’s only Ilsa and Ethan, she waits for him on foot so that he falls off to avoid hitting her and she can at that point go away alone. She takes the file to chief Atlee, the head of MI6, who tells her to go back to Lane. She thought now she might be back to MI6 officially, and is quite crossed because returning to Lane now is too dangerous. She doesn’t know that Atlee deleted the files on the pendrive before she took it again. Without suspicions she took the pendrive to Lane, who still didn’t kill her when it turned out to be empty. It’s not clear why Lane kept ‘forgiving’ her like that, but the best explanation seems to be that she could get close to Ethan and that was part of Lane’s plan. In fact, when they talk at the airport, Benji is abducted. Luther loses Ilsa and Ethan and Brandt are too late to save Benji (one of the two or three short scenes featuring Ethan and Brandt in the same shot).
Lane calls Ethan and blackmails him into decrypting the file before midnight in order to save Benji’s life. To decrypt the file, they need the prime minister of Great Britain... Ethan agrees. Brandt is not at all happy with this plan, but he admits he can’t see any other way around it, so he pretends to be betraying his friends (obviously, never thought for a second that he meant it), he calls Hunley and tells him where to find Hunt and who he’s targeting. Hunley approaches Chief Atlee thinking he’s taking control of the situation and surprising Hunt, but it didn’t surprise me when it was revealed that this Atlee was Ethan himself. Of course it was. The prime minister is attending a charity auction when Atlee and Hunley take him to a secure room giving orders not to be disturbed. Believing him to be the real Atlee, the prime minister speaks freely, and it turns out that the syndicate was actually Atlee’s idea once, that it would have given him - him the PM - absolute control over these dangerous men and a lot of money to do whatever he wanted without any control whatsoever; he had refused such an idea, and the project was supposedly abandoned. Now Lane wants access to all the money in various secret accounts, that had been prepared for the syndicate. Hunley is very much surprised to learn that the syndicate really exists, he thought it was all Hunt’s fantasy or cover. They shoot the pm and his guards with darts containing what I thought was something to make them sleep, although it’s not clear why the pm needs an antidote... anyway, the plan is to make it look like Atlee shot the pm and Hunley saved him, so that Hunley accepts and lets them go.
They can now unlock the data. They look at it and it’s a list of accounts all over the world. We don’t know yet Ethan’s plan but we see him destroying the pendrive. He gets to the meeting’s place, where he sees Ilsa with a gun and Benij strapped to a bomb. The idea is that if Ethan gives him the data Lane will kill only Ethan and Benji, while if he doesn’t everyone in that place will die when the bomb go off. A scary threat indeed but also a meaningless one because if the bomb goes off he’ll never get access to those important data. The bomb was very scenographic but it made no sense at all, let me tell you.
Ethan convinces him that the file has been destroyed, he’s the file now, the data all in his head, so if he dies the information he wants will be lost forever.
The bomb disarmed and Benji gone away, Lane orders his men to kill Ilsa and bring Ethan to him. Now she has to stay firmly behind him, since they can’t kill him, but they both shoot, being on the same side. They try to escape but are separated. Ilsa has a confrontation with Vinter, a knife fight which was very cool, and she won. She didn’t go full MMA on him, she only ever used the jump-on-the-head move which is so scenographic. Ronda did it in the Expendables, only she can do it for real.
Anyway, I was quite surprised at this Ilsa character, it was good and believable, and rather well played: scared when need to be but always courageous and determined, intelligent and loyal, and at the end there is no romantic story between her and any of the other characters, good or bad. Good! This is so rare in any movie, thank you.
Ethan is finally face to face with Lane, and lures him where his team prepared a trap for him, who unknowingly enters it spontaneously. Finally secured into a bulletproof glass cell, they fill it with some gas, probably to make him sleep, and take him away.
Now we are back in front of the senate committee where Hunley declares that it had all been part of a joint operation between IMF and CIA and therefore now that it is concluded he asks for the IMF to be fully restored. The last scene shows us Brandt calling Hunley the sew Secretary of IMF.
Ethan Hunt-Tom Cruise
Ilsa Faust-Rebecca Ferguson
Brandt-Jeremy Renner
Benji-Simon Pegg
Luther-Ving Rhames
Lane-Sean Harris
Atlee-Simon McBurney
Hunley-Alec Baldwin
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