Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol: Rated “PG-13” (132 Minutes)
Starring: Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Josh Holloway
Directed by: Brad Bird
When last we saw Ethan Hunt (Cruise), he was happily reunited with his lovely wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), after the pair was targeted by a particularly villainous international weapons and information dealer. One could theoretically presume that Hunt’s life was all roses after that, only not so much. As this film opens Hunt is in a Bulgarian prison as a couple of IMF agents break him out.
The team is immediately given a new mission to extract some data from the secure vaults inside the Kremlin, only to have that mission go sideways causing the President to disavow all knowledge of the IMF, throwing the entire agency and all of its agents under a bus. Now Hunt and his small team — without the backing of the IMF’s vast resources, must find a dangerous terrorist named Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) who really did bomb the Kremlin, and clear all of their names.
As with previous installments of this franchise, the action is fast and highly-kinetic and the spying aspects are not just impossible, but quite improbable as well. Yes, yes, the entirety of the film serves up an edge-of-your-seat intensity that makes the 2+ hours of the film rush pell-mell past you as the agents are bounced from one heart-stopping sequence to the next. Further, they jet around the world from Eastern Europe, to Russia, to Dubai, to India as they attempt to stop Hendricks from not only acquiring the launch codes for the nuclear armada at his disposal, but in turn launching the missiles at their unsuspecting targets.
As far as the franchise goes, this outing is perhaps the best of the bunch, the effects are spectacular, the tension is palatable, and the action is spot on. (We particularly enjoyed the Dubai sequence in the Burj Khalifa Hotel when Ethan had to not only scale the outside of the glass building, but then run back down the side to get back into his own room to set the plan in motion.) Still, given that we grew up watching the TV show on which this series is based, we have to raise our single objection (that we’ve raised each and every time we’ve reviewed these films).
There is not enough of Lalo Schifrin’s music playing during the course of the film. If you never experienced the original show with the quite driving beat of Schifrin’s compelling licks playing underneath the silence of the action, then you truly can’t appreciate how well the music drives the action, moving everything forward towards its inevitable conclusion. The a-synchronous beat of the music lying underneath the long silent stretches of the agents performing their tasks was utterly innovative back in 1966, and it is the only thing that is missing from these films. Without it, they are just another high0-octaine blockbuster, with it; they evolve into an entire new genre.
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Robert J. Sodaro has been writing professionally for over 30 years. During that time, his movie reviews and articles have appeared in numerous publications, as well as on the web
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