Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol review
The “Mission: Impossible” franchise has to be one of the most elastic in film history. Unlike James Bond or Harry Potter, the M:I series allows the characters to change in order to fit the vision of the director. The first (and still best entry) was a stylish Brian DePalma action thriller while the second and hardly recognizable installment was a John Woo slo-mo actioneer and worst in the series by far. A variety of other talented and wide ranging directors have become attached to various incarnations of the third film from David Fincher to Joe Carnahan before finally settling on (what turned out to be a brilliant choice) “Alias” showrunner J.J. Abrams. This big screen debut allowed Abrams an opportunity to exercise his small screen obsessions on a much larger scale but still keeping the human element at the forefront. Abrams stayed involved as a producer on the most recent installment which has Pixar superstar Brad Bird (“The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille”) making his live action debut.
At the center of all this is Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, a character perpetually running away from or towards danger as fast as he possibly can. In “Ghost Protocol,” we see Hunt once again starting out with a relatively clean slate. His team from the last adventure has dispersed—with the exception of Simon Pegg’s Benji now ready for field duty—and his wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) has apparently been dispatched with as well. It may make sense to push her out of the picture because it frees up Ethan to do his globetrotting adventuring but it’s unfortunate because that human element gave the third film it’s beating heart. In it’s place this time around are agents Jane (Paula Patton) and Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and many elaborately staged feats of the near-impossible. Some of these sequences will very nearly take your breath away—like the much discussed Dubai section that finds Hunt dangling outside the window of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
Lending some extra “wow” to these sequences is the fact that about 20 minutes of the film were shot in IMAX. (So far the only major studio releases to be filmed in the format are “The Dark Knight” and “” so you can pretty much ignore the “IMAX” label on all those other films cheating you out of the extra $5 bucks.) Shot by regular Paul Thomas Anderson cinematographer Robert Elswit, the film looks damn good and Bird has made a seamless transition away from pixels and into the real world. But the script by “Alias” vets Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec is limp and repetitive. Never has the “here is the plan,” “no, that’s impossible,” “well we’re doing it anyway” [repeat] structure of the films become as apparent as it is here. Hunt as a character character has been fully stripped down leaving Cruise has very little to do here except play a dude who is really good at running. The baddie, played by Swedish ‘Dragon Tattoo’ vet Michael Nykvist is pretty generic, especially compared to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s calmly focused antagonist.
But it’s the absence of Monaghan that is felt the most strongly here. Though her screen time was limited, as a plot device she added the invaluable personal element instead of leaning solely on the “saving the world” plotline, which sadly is the only thing hanging MI:4 together. It’s a sadly workmanlike and mostly personality free installment, with a few thrilling sequences but a forgettable arc you likely wont be able to recall once you’ve left the theater. All of this comes as quite a disappointment coming from Bird who made arguably Pixar’s best film in “The Incredibles,” one that was heavily influenced by some of the same 60’s spy material that the ‘Impossible’ franchise draws its origins from. A respectable effort, missing the verve, wit and humanity present in all of Bird’s other filmography, it should nonetheless serve as a launching pad for the filmmaker to hopefully pursue other, more personal projects, live action or otherwise.
