Movie

In a year packed to the gills with returning heroes like Star Wars and Jurassic Park and the Avengers, it’s easy to overlook something like Mission: Impossible 5. And that’s perfectly understandable, because what are the Mission: Impossible films if not incredibly expensive excuses for Tom Cruise to dangle off stuff? And, in all honesty, if you’ve seen Tom Cruise dangle from one thing, you’ve pretty much seen him dangle from everything.

That said, yesterday’s teaser for Mission: Impossible 5 – now titled Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation, presumably because Mission: Impossible: Attack: Of: The: Overzealous: Colons was too unwieldy – had all the makings of Tom Cruise’s dangliest adventure yet. The full trailer has just been released; can it provide any more clues?

From this, we can assume that Mission: Impossible 5 is set in a parallel universe in which Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock now finds himself as the head of an international intelligence service. Here, he states that wants the Impossible Missions Force shut down. This is possibly because he didn’t see the last Mission: Impossible film, in which the Impossible Missions Force was shut down.

Obviously his decision will be appealed by Tom Cruise, here seen pulling his deliberately cute “Who, me?” face with his top off. I’m starting to think that Tom Cruise won’t be in this film very much, because the sum total of his Mission: Impossible requirements involve riding a motorbike, running really fast, pulling a deliberately cute “Who, me?” face and dangling off stuff. At this point in the trailer, he’s already ridden a motorbike and run really fast, so this still effectively renders his work 80% complete.

But that’s OK, because Mission: Impossible is an ensemble piece now. Here’s Simon Pegg, in fact, in the only city in the world where you can see more than one person wearing a tuxedo on the tube at the same time.