Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

The Kremlin has blown up. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has been blamed for the attack. He escapes from Moscow hospital bed handcuffs via paper clip and an improvised zip-line. This in itself is a moment – in a lesser film said get away would be a centerpiece, here it barely rates above ho hum. In the next scene, Hunt is debriefed in a limo. “Pen!” He demands, and proceeds to draw the baddie freehand from memory like a police sketch artist while accepting the bad and the worse from Tom Wilkinson. It’s not only an excellent moment in character development – the Kremlin is kaput; Ethan has escaped custody only to be greeted with a “your company and job no longer exist, and, by the way, everybody is blaming you for the explosion,” and in the middle of being dressed down, he can still concentrate well enough to place the security of his nation above his own. And at the same time, we get a glimpse as to why, despite the wonderful techno-gizmos we’ve already seen, there is no substitute yet for the human brain. Do you believe an intelligence agent can ID a guy from a rough sketch on the palm of a hand? I do. Special guy, special circumstances, sure … and I don’t believe the same guy could disarm a trained professional in ½ a second. But still. Better question: does it matter? This is what happens in the down time of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

There is only one test of an espionage action film. It’s this: when the stunts are ridiculous, do you care or are you along for the ride? I can’t remember the last time I truly enjoyed an action film for the action. Wait. Yes, I can. It was Live Free or Die Hard. That’s a lot of questioning of action sequences in between.

I’m about as surprised as anybody here – I didn’t especially like any of the previous Mission: Impossibles. I especially disliked the John Woo version. Every three seconds, somebody ripped off a fake face to reveal he was really a woman or the Cheeseburglar or something. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol has exactly one “I’m not who you think I am” moment, and it took me completely by surprise.

This is one of those rare films where you can’t wait to catalog what you saw and go tell somebody about it. I’m trying to stop myself from doing exactly that; the action in Ghost Protocol is phenomenal.

Another big plus in this edition is finally surrounding Tom Cruise with the right people – in three previous Missions, I only liked the relationship between Cruise and Ving Rhames. Here, he has an entire team of good people: Brandt (Jeremy Renner), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Jane (Paula Patton). I look forward to all these guys being Impossible in the future. If nothing else, try not enjoying the moment where Benji offers personal condolences to Hunt during the Kremlin break-in.

This is Brad Bird’s first attempt at non-animated direction and it’s a huge success; I guess it makes sense; both Simon Pegg and Tom Cruise are more cartoon than human anyway. It was a perfect fit.

Rated PG-13, 133 Minutes
D: Brad Bird
W: Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec
Genre: Averting armageddon
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Team America, F*** yeah!
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Terrorists