Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to skip all of the potential Oscar-caliber fare out there and go for some straight-up sheer entertainment. With Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the bar for exciting megawatt blockbuster couldn’t be set any higher—literally.
Tom Cruise returns to his globetrotting ways as IMF super-spy Ethan Hunt, on the run with three other fugitive agents after a bombing at the Kremlin building has the team framed as terrorists, and causes intense friction between the U.S. and Russia. The President initiates Ghost Protocol to shut down the entire IMF Agency. Only Hunt and his team can stop the real terrorist, Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), an extremist bent on worldwide nuclear destruction.
From the film’s opening, the excitement kicks off and rarely lets up, delivering relenting pulse-pounding action sequences. This is Cruise’s most accomplished action film to date, and that’s saying something. The man, regardless of his tarnished off-screen persona, is one heck of a performer. If this fourth installment of the M:I franchise doesn’t reignite his star power, I don’t know what will. At nearly 50-years-old, Cruise delivers a physical performance that is often stunning. Bruised and tossed around the screen, the man flies around this film like a winged insect—running, kicking, punching, ascending, flipping, falling, flailing, you name it. The film could have been titled Run Tommy Run.
And what about those impressive action sequences? This is a wall-to-wall assault of a movie, but the action never becomes tedious or dull. It totally and completely serves the story, keeping the plot in a constant motion, and invigorating this franchise with a heap of fresh and interesting possibilities. Credit Brad Bird, a former Pixar director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, for making a live-action cartoon that never once feels cartoonish. The picture is simultaneously gritty and relaxed. Bird finds just the right tone for his movie, returning the series to a team-oriented picture rather than just another Tom Cruise vehicle.
Actors Paula Patton, Jeremy Renner, and the comedic Simon Pegg round out the team quite nicely. Everyone plays a crucial role to the events of the film. I was not at all surprised to find this fresh change. Cruise has consistently made every Mission: Impossible film entirely unique and different, utilizing a new director for each installment, for better or worse. Brian De Palma delivered a twisty plot with the first mission. John Woo excelled with balletic action sequences that took precedence over the storyline in M:I-2. J.J. Abrams delved into a personal quest for Ethan Hunt against a cutthroat adversary in the third outing. For Ghost Protocol, Brad Bird seeks to tip the scales for extreme blockbuster entertainment, gaining top-dollar out of every shot, and reinvigorating the team spirit of the franchise. Even with a villain in Hendricks that seems more like an afterthought than a real threat, unlike Philip Seymour Hoffman’s menace from the 2006 film, M:I-4 still fires on all cylinders because Bird keeps the threat immediate rather than looming.
I was treated to this film in IMAX format. 30 minutes of the film was shot natively in IMAX. The towering picture for certain sequences could described as none other than absolutely stunning. The sequence featuring Cruise ascending the Burj Khalifa tower using questionable suction gloves is a scene that will be talked about for a long time. Experiencing it in IMAX added to the intensity and vertigo. Rather unbelievably, the scene was apparently filmed on the actual tower with Cruise actually dangling from it 130-some stories above ground. How will another sequel top this? I don’t know. I’m calling mission impossible on that one.
As for this franchise, it’s reached an incredible high with Bird at the helm. The series has never been better. Action movies in general have rarely been better. And that is no easy feat, as this somewhat underrated series has consistently delivered the goods over the last 15 years. Lackluster villain complaint aside, this Mission is probably the most entertaining film all of 2011 has to offer, and you’d be crazier than Tom Cruise to miss it.
When this movie came out I was surprised at how little attention it got from the general public. Having watched it this week, though, I think I can understand why: Lions for Lambs is not exactly entertaining per se, and it’s also a tricky premise to sell to an audience (especially an audience that has catapulted drivel like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen into the box office stratosphere) because of the multi-faceted approach to telling its story. The action unfolds in real time as senator Jasper Irving, played by Tom Cruise who looks and acts like the all-growed-up version of his Daniel Kaffe character in A Few Good Men, is being interviewed by journalist Janine Roth, played by Meryl Streep. She gets him to spill the beans about a new strategy for finally winning the War –a plan that is being put into action in Afghanistan as they speak, and involves two young soldiers who get separated from the rest of their platoon. The two soldiers just happen to be former students of professor Stephen Malley–Robert Redford in a role that feels as natural as any he has ever played, if a bit more passionate at times. Malley is, at the same time this is all going on, trying to knock some real-world sense into one of his students (young actor Andrew Garfield, channeling a healthy dose of Judd Nelson’s character from The Breakfast Club), using his former students as examples of true courage and conviction, even though he personally disagrees with their decision to join the military.
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