Review: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)

Ethan Hunt is back, with an oddly long hairdo and all of the old flair, even as Tom Cruise teeters on the edge of 50. The fourth installation in the TV-turned-movie series finds Hunt in a Russian prison, though he anon escapes with the aplomb of a Bruce Willis cum Arnie violent spree assisted by new tech whiz Benji (Simon Pegg). We soon learn that Ethan has been disavowed by the IMF (why they use the name of the beleaguered financial organization is certainly open for debate), implicated in the killing of Serbians after his wife disappeared and must now work to stop a Russian terrorist, Hendricks (played by the excellent Michael Nyqvist), bent on setting off nuclear war to create some sort of crazed renaissance of the remaining lifeforms. The first attempt at intercepting the codes ends up going awry and after a part of the Kremlin is blown up, the IMF is implicated in the blast and completely shut down. In steps costar Jeremy Renner (Brandt) who along with Ethan, Benji and Jane (Paula Patton) team up to restore the IMF good name and save the world.

The latest film succeeds even in its excess and silliness. The startling cinematography, seemingly impossible camera angles and dazzling, almost inexplicable technology of the team all add up to a romp of a film that cascades seamlessly from one breathtaking scene to the next. From the claustrophobic prison escape to the Kremlin intrusion and explosion to a car crash escape, climb up the glass walls of a skyscraper and beautifully shot sand storm, the film works even as it defies reality at every turn. Pegg assists in this process by adding an element of humor largely missing from the first three installments and even as Cruise seems to overpepper the gravitas as has become more common in his latter films, the surrounding cast lightens the overall tableau sufficiently to keep us from paying too much attention to the rather absurd simplicity with which a rogue scientist could gain the codes and technology to launch a nuclear weapon. In the end, I still prefer the first film shot by one of my favorite directors, Brian Depalma, but in a Hollywood where blockbusters rarely live up the hype, this is one action-thriller worth the $11. A-