MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — GHOST PROTOCOL
***
DIRECTED BY Brad Bird
STARS Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner
There's a scene in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol in which Tom Cruise's agent extraordinaire Ethan Hunt must climb up the outside of a tall building with only the aid of a pair of electronic gloves that fasten themselves to any given surface. It isn't enough that it's a towering edifice — it has to be Dubai's Burj Khalifa, merely the tallest building in the world. And it isn't enough that a pair of gloves seem like scarce supplies for a climbing expedition — one of the blasted things must malfunction during the ascent, meaning a single hand is all that prevents Ethan from falling to his doom a hundred-plus stories below. And did I mention that, during the descent, he's a few stories shy of reaching safety, meaning he has to swing around wildly like a pinata that's been whacked a few times in the hopes of propelling himself into an open window?
It's utterly ridiculous — and also utterly exciting. The fourth M:I film based on the classic TV series — and the third to be worth a damn (only the second one was a letdown) — this wisely continues the tradition of assigning a different director to each chapter, going from Brian De Palma to John Woo to J.J. Abrams and now to Brad Bird. Bird, of course, is the animation mainstay behind Ratatouille, The Incredibles and The Iron Giant, and in making his live-action debut, he demonstrates that he's not going to allow a real-world setting to hamper an imagination that had been instrumental in making toon tales. The plot line concocted by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec (both vets of Abrams' TV show Alias) is so hoary that it might as well have come from a 1960s-era Bond flick: A Russian madman (Michael Nyqvist, Mikael Blomkvist in the European Millennium trilogy) plans to cleanse the earth via a nuclear war, and it's up to the only active members of the Impossible Missions Force (Cruise, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg), plus a government analyst harboring a secret (Jeremy Renner), to take him down.
At 135 minutes, the film admittedly overstays its welcome — the coda is particularly draggy, even if it does offer a pair of pleasing cameos — and Cruise's Ethan Hunt is more inscrutable than ever. But for action buffs desperate for a hit to jump-start their hearts, here's a Mission impossible to refuse.
Go here for a look at the 10 Best & 10 Worst Films of 2011.
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