Movie review: Mission Impossible Rogue Nation

The upside (if you can call it that) of being snowed in with 30 inches of snow is that you can gather for family movie night every night of Snowzilla (as long as school is cancelled the next day, of course).  We resumed Snowzilla movie watching with Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.  I am generally a fan of the franchise, even though it’s not anything like the television series, which I loved growing up.  I am also a huge fan of Jeremy Renner but a less than huge fan of Tom Cruise, whom I tolerate because the movies have been pretty entertaining.
The best thing I can say about this movie is that it is highly mediocre.  (Actually, the best thing I can say about this movie is that Ving Rhames makes a return for (a little bit) longer than 5 minutes.)  I do wonder whether Tom Cruise was so worried that Jeremy Renner might upstage him (which he came close to doing in the last movie) that the writers carefully crafted a plot that allowed Jeremy Renner to do nothing but play the ineffective bureaucrat with no action scenes to be had.  Alex Baldwin plays a jacka— CIA director, which is probably not a huge acting stretch for him.  And most attempts at comedic dialogue in the movie fall flat.
Otherwise, the movie is a grand tribute to Tom Cruise (did I mention I wasn’t a fan?) with a limited plot and unimpressive special effects.  I will say that the best scene in the movie was the one with the British Prime Minister and contained clever dialogue and ingenious plot twists.  Other than that, the movie was completely unimpressive in every way (but not horrible, just mediocre).