From the Rental Vault: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

For his fifth outing as Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise finds himself up against an organization called the Syndicate, made up of missing, disavowed and presumed dead agents from around the world -- and headed by one of the most brilliant and ruthless. The only problem -- CIA Director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) has convinced the United States Senate that the IMF is out of control and they have shut it down and recalled its agents.

Hunt has to rely on his own abilities and a few trusted friends in order to track down the leadership of the Syndicate and prevent them from gaining the resources they need to spread terror around the globe and create a kind of shadow government that will control everyone else. Along the way he will also team up with Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a discredited agent who may be working for the Syndicate or for her own government. Either way, she is most certainly working for herself and whether or not that helps Hunt is by no means determined. Also undetermined is if Hunt will hold things together long enough to track down and expose the syndicate, or if his desire to beat the Syndicate leader, rogue English agent Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) has clouded his judgment.

Whatever his shortcomings as an actor, Cruise has always been able to project manic intensity, and he does that again here. Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn, Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell and Jeremy Renner as William Brandt all reprise their roles from earlier movies and hold their places in the choreography. The final third of the movie has some pretty good twisty-turny spy v. spy chess between Lane and Hunt, but up until that it's a series of random action set pieces, only a couple of which really rise to the occasion and some of which are largely repeated from earlier movies. Christopher McQuarrie and Drew Pearce's script does almost nothing new with the characters or universe: Solomon Lane's omniscient game-playing echoes Owen Davian from the third movie; the disavowed Hunt-on-the-run is a repeat from entries one and four; the "rogue" IMF echoes no. four, and so on.

While the contest between Lane and Hunt gains some extra flavor from the personal level of conflict, a lot of the energy behind that comes because Lane shot a young female agent at the beginning of the movie in front of an imprisoned Hunt -- again echoing a move by Owen Davian and another example of a female character existing to be terrorized and killed by the villain and motivate the hero.

Paramount and Cruise have confirmed that a sixth Mission: Impossible movie is in the works. Without some indication that it's going to be something different than what's happened before, this may be the time to join the secretary in disavowing any knowledge of the IMF's actions.