MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION (12A)

4 stars

It’s a sad state of affairs that Tom Cruise is the biggest star on the planet in every measure other than box office returns. For charisma, charm and sheer star wattage, on and off the camera, he’s still at the top of a tree he’s occupied for over 30 years now.

And yet for some reason cinemagoers, or perhaps more correctly, American cinemagoers, don’t want to look at his films anymore outside the Mission: Impossible franchise.

In the face of this apathy he seems to have made it his mission to astonish audiences into submission by attempting things on screen that no human, never mind a pampered A-lister, should be doing.

That included dangling from the world’s tallest building in Ghost Protocol, the previous M:I movie, and now this fifth entry in the series showcases Cruise as superspy Ethan Hunt hanging on seemingly unharnessed from the side of a plane in take-off.

It’s pretty much what the entire film is being sold on, and looks like part of an elaborate climactic sequence, but in actual fact it happens in the first two minutes as Hunt and his team target a group of terrorists.

He’s trying to get on the plane to rescue its dangerous cargo and, as prologues go, it’s magnificent stuff, brief but jaw-dropping and clearly completely real. See it in IMAX with the sound making the floor beneath you shake and you’ll feel like you’re taking off with him.

Such heights are hard to sustain, and for some of the next hour or so as plot elements are clicked into position, it can sometimes feel like you’re back down to earth and sitting in a traffic jam on the M8 instead of flying high.

First off there’s the emergence of a shadowy organisation known as the Syndicate, rogue operatives responsible for worldwide atrocities.

Then the Impossible Mission Force gets dissolved at the behest of Alec Baldwin’s CIA boss who doesn’t believe the Syndicate exists and thinks Hunt is himself rogue, leaving him on the CIA’s wanted list and on the run with only Simon Pegg’s analyst Benji to help him.

Ethan has already encountered Ilsa Faust (the excellent Rebecca Ferguson), a potential double agent who looks to be working for the Syndicate, led by a chilling bad guy in Solomon Lane (Sean Harris, who seems as though his many years of playing quietly dangerous nutters have been leading to this).

None of this is dull, but there’s a lot of it, interspersed with a bunch of fights and some country hopping. A polished sequence at the Vienna opera sets the film back on track while also setting up the mystery of just what exactly Ilsa is up to. And central to the Mission movies is having to steal a bit of tech from an impregnable stronghold, leading to a top notch underwater escapade that owes a lot to Gravity.

There’s a high-speed motorbike pursuit in Morocco that will leave you breathless, assuming you’ve got it back after the underwater stuff, but not all of these action moments feel like they're advancing the story, the bike chase in particular. So for all that these sequences look cool and offer fleeting excitement, there’s a bit of padding here, and a few too many computer generated cars despite protestations that it’s all for reals.

Critically though, as much of what makes these movies good is built on tension as it is on action. But even more importantly than that, it’s built on characters, and makes a virtue of Hunt’s doggedness and willingness to do what it takes for the mission.

The result is a delicately balanced and extremely suspenseful chess game (not literally!) between Ethan and Lane that ratchets up as we head towards one of the best finales of the series.

Cruise is reliably excellent throughout and Jeremy Renner gets some funny lines but absolutely nothing to do in the action stakes (for some reason Benji has been promoted to second fiddle), which seems like a shame considering how able he was in Ghost Protocol. Overshadowing all of them is Ferguson, with the little-known Swede demonstrating serious combat chops as well as convincing us as an agent with a lot of secrets.

With 15 minutes shaved off and a little more clarity of focus, Rogue Nation might have claimed Best Mission: Impossible Movie. We’ll just have to settle for it being a first rate action movie and a terrific spy movie.

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Running time: 131 mins

THE COBBLER (12A)

2 stars

Don’t go expecting typical Adam Sandler shenanigans with this initially intriguing but eventually tiresome fantasy drama, which stars Sandler as a sad-sack New York cobbler who spends his days forlornly fixing shoes.

When his usual cobbling machine breaks, he takes to a generations-old stitching machine that turns out to have an enchantment wherein Sandler assumes the appearance of the owner of the shoes he's wearing.

Though he looks and sounds like them he's still himself inside and at first he has some fun with it, getting away with stuff or trying to help people.

The important thing is what gets done with the premise but the movie goes on to rather bottle a couple of interesting situations, cheating its way out rather than writing it.

It’s sprinkled with a couple of gently humorous moments but though it initially seems to have a decent centre, as it progresses it gets into dodgier areas that it doesn't know how to resolve.

By trying to be too many things, from a fantasy comedy to a warm family drama before introducing a crime element, it ends up riddled with holes and inconsistencies before collapsing into predictability and sentiment.

Director: Thomas McCarthy

Running time: 98 mins

HOT PURSUIT (12A)

1 star

This feeble buddy comedy stars Reese Witherspoon as an over-zealous and by the book cop tasked with babysitting Sofia Vergara, the wife of the star witness against a cartel boss.

This may seem like a stellar team-up on paper, a chalk and cheese pairing of the fussy and the fiery as the pair go on the run from gangsters and crooked cops.

But there’s a lot of yelling and stupidity in the absence of jokes as it grows increasingly daft and frantic through variations on the same scene over and over, all the while remaining laugh and story free.

Witherspoon doesn’t convince for a moment and as for Vergara, the biggest comedy star on TV, it goes to show that with weak material and lousy direction, even the best will flounder.

Director: Anne Fletcher

Running time: 87 mins

CUB (15)

2 stars

A bunch of cub scouts take a trip to the woods in this uninspired Belgian slasher, where their leaders tell tales of a werewolf boy, Kai, in order to scare them.

Kai might actually be real though, and main kid Sam might have a bond with him. The set-up seems sound, doing what plenty of its ilk do, which is taking a group of people, a single location and a mythology and running with it.

The problem is that although the Kai mask is a creepy and effective creation, the mythology is garbled and it’s a while before anything actually happens.

Once it gets going it doesn’t really make any sense, promising some tidy gore but never quite delivering and barely bothering with a second act. It’s shot in that glossy yet grimy look of many an American backwoods horror, which isn’t really enough to prevent Cub being a bit of a letdown.

Director: Jonas Govaerts

Running time: 84 mins