Many of the country’s most famous comics learned their craft here, entertaining the punters between the displays of pulchritude.
‘We never closed’ became its proud boast. In the background stands the Windmill Theatre, famous for staging the first – artistically – nude revue shows in the capital, and for remaining open every night during the German Blitz on the capital during WWII. The boxes are real, though there aren’t quite as many of them as appear in the film. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation location: Ethan calls IMF: Great Windmill Street, London W1Īfter escaping the dungeon (and what decent West End basement doesn’t have one?), Hunt phones the IMF organisation from one of those very boxes on Great Windmill Street off Shaftesbury Avenue, just north of Piccadilly Circus. The film has been described as a ‘love letter to London’, but it’s a rather nostalgic view of the city, where you can not only find a vintage record shop in the heart of town, but every street has a couple of fully-functioning, non-vandalised red telephone phone boxes. It seems IMF has been infiltrated and Hunt finds himself captured and held prisoner until he's unexpectedly freed by the mysterious Ilsa Faust ( Rebecca Ferguson). In reality it’s a dry cleaning business, Classi Clean, 5 Air Street, between Regent Street and Piccadilly. The vinyl store, which sells cool jazz recordings and still has old-school listening booths, is sadly just an invention. The ‘Belorussian’ airfield is RAF Wittering, just south of the village of Stamford in Lincolnshire (although, confusingly, its runways actually cross the boundary between Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire).Īfter a rousing burst of the theme tune, the film proper begins in the heart of London’s West End with Hunt emerging from Piccadilly Circus underground station and heading up major shopping thoroughfare Regent Street to find a little record shop tucked away in a side street where he’s to get his briefing. No matter how much CGI improves, nothing matches the breathtaking immediacy of a real physical stunt (yes, I know wires and safety harnesses have been removed digitally).
The much-touted pre-credits sequence sees Ethan Hunt ( Tom Cruise) clinging to an Airbus A400M Atlas stuffed with biowarfare material as it takes off from an airfield in ‘Minsk’. Time was, sequels got increasingly cheaper and tattier with time ( Jaws IV, Superman IV…) but, along with the Fast And Furious franchise, the Mission: Impossible series shows no sign of running out of steam just yet.Īnd though there’s nothing startlingly new about Rogue Nation, it breezes enjoyably along from one belting set piece to another.
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