Movie Review: 'Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol'

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton Directed by Brad Bird Rated PG-13

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is film that defies expectations.  It’s a big-budget star vehicle for an actor who has mostly lost his star power.  It’s directed by Brad Bird, who has previously only done animated films.  But most of all, it’s the fourth film in a series and it is undeniably the best of all of them.  How many times has that happened?

The plot revolves around IMF agent Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) attempts to capture Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist), a Russian-employed nuclear strategist who dreams of worldwide nuclear destruction and the human evolution that would result.  We’re given the barest details of his motivations, probably because to focus more would just magnify how little sense they make.  The situation escalates once Cobalt blows up the Moscow Kremlin, framing Hunt in the process and forcing the US Government to disband IMF completely.  With no support, Ethan and his team members Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton) join up with William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), a desk analyst who knows more then he lets on, and are forced to stop Cobalt on their own.

The story itself never gets much more complex than that, and yet manages to cram mission after mission, fight after fight, and gadget after gadget in it’s 132-minute running time and the result is a movie bursting at the seams with exhilarating action.  We are given some mild character development, but it really only acts as an excuse to give breathing room to the audience in-between the action.  Jeremy Renner does well as the only interesting character, and Simon Pegg gets all of the laughs you expect him to.

If we’re judging the film by storytelling standards, this is not what you could call a great movie.  You’d have trouble arguing that it was even a good movie.  The characters are flat, the plot isn’t structured very well, and the screenplay only really manages to cover up its own flaws by giving you pretty things to look at.  But oh, does it give you pretty things to look at. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is the best example of thrills-over-substance filmmaking since anything I can remember.  This is the movie that Transformers director Michael Bay desperately wants to make.

As previously said, director Brad Bird has only previously done animated projects, such as the cult classic The Iron Giant and Pixar hits The Incredibles and Ratatouille.  I questioned whether or not he had the experience to make things work for live action, but he manages to bring the creativity he exhibited in those projects to life.  This is seen especially in the toys he gives Hunt’s team to play with.  I’ll refrain from going into details and spoiling the fun, but this film has some of the most awesome secret agent gadgets ever seen in any movie, let alone the previous entries in the series.  I’m not sure whom the people behind the Bond franchise are planning on giving the director’s reigns to after Skyfall, but they couldn’t choose better then him.

Bird’s visual eye fares just as well, giving us action scenes that are exciting and chaotic without being confusing.  Somewhere around the halfway point, we get a stunning sequence hinted at in trailers in which Ethan Hunt climbs up and runs down the Burj Khalifa, the highest skyscraper in the world.  I’d consider it the most amazing action sequence we’ve seen this year if I hadn’t watched The Dark Knight Rises prologue about an hour earlier.  It’s extraordinary enough to actually hurt the movie as a whole, as no other sequence really comes close to matching it afterwards and makes the film feel lopsided.  But, I think I’ve already given this movie too much thought.  I saw it, it entertained the hell out of me, and I’m not gonna ask for anything more.

Comments

[dan novak]

i would place this movie lower than the second one, i saw the movie based on this review, and i dont even know what to say, it was a god aweful mess, there was no plot, no sense of urgency, it was goofy, everything felt tacked on and, seriously what the hell was up with the holowall and the magnet suit? im not even going to mention the car nose dive, and the overly cheesey overly melodromatic scene between cruise and renner at the end. i cant believe this got 4 abiding dudes.

p.s its a wierd coincidence that the 1st and 3rd were good and he has short hair but the 2nd and 4th were terrible and he had long hair.....idk just something to think about