Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol Review

This summer we saw plenty of franchises that were clearly running out of gas (I’m looking at you Pirates of the Caribbean). It’s refreshing to see that on its fourth installment the Mission Impossible franchise manages to keep itself fresh.

Lets get the mediocre out of the way first, the plot. Its pretty standard, almost disappointingly so. Some Russians are out to start nuclear war and set the world into chaos. We are never really told their intentions for doing so, other than to be just plain evil I guess. So Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his band of recently disavowed secret agents must stop them, all while using the coolest gadgets they can get their hands on. It’s just that this story is so shallow and has been done to death, even this year with X-men First Class. It’s a shame director Brad Bird did not have something more original to work with.

What Bird lacks in story he makes up for in the telling. Ghost Protocol is visually a well-told story. After a summer of bloated action films that were filmed so incomprehensively it was near impossible to follow the action happening on screen. Bird frames his action scenes so cleanly it was easy to forget the plot was paper-thin and get wrapped up in what was happening. There is a prison fight scene early on in the film that suffers from the camera being too zoomed in on the action, on a bigger screen it becomes more of a problem as the image becomes almost too uncomfortable to watch. But in the grand scheme of the film it’s a forgivable offense. In later action scenes the camera is placed properly.

Bird makes his first jump into directing live action feature films with Ghost Protocol and shows he is just as competent with it as he is animation, Bird’s previous films being The Iron Giant and Pixar’s The Incredibles. In fact on that note I’m pretty sure the “Your mission…if you choose to accept it…” voice is the same radio voice Bird used on The Incredibles.

Tom cruise leads the cast doing what he does best. He is joined this time by Paula Patton, Simon Pegg (who serves remarkably well as the films obvious comic relief) and Jeremy Renner, who does a fine job of it. We will be seeing more of Renner in this type of role plenty in the future, in Marvel’s The Avengers and the new Bourne films. Unlike MI: 3 there is no strong leading villain in Ghost Protocol, and that’s regrettable but not to be considered a deal breaker.

In the end what we have is a strong film that compared to other action films this year, is near the head of the pack. A solid cast that shares a strong chemistry and a production that is well though out and solidly executed. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but it’s one of the strongest the franchise has to offer.

3/4 Stars

Note: I saw this film in an Imax theatre and it makes good use of the format. Especially during an intense sequence where Tom Cruise has to scale a few stories of the tallest building in the world. So if you are interested in that kind of thing (and you should be) then I recommend checking it out in Imax.