Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Good movie, too bad there wasn’t more action. Kidding, kidding! MI4 is loaded with action. And not just any action: great action. Great suspense. Great movie. This is just one of those amazingly well-constructed action flicks which pump you up and leave you exhilarated as you walk out of the theater.

Ghost Protocol follows the same basic idea as most of the Mission Impossible movies. A covert op involving Ethan Hunt’s IMF team goes wrong, and he is blamed for it. In this case, its a bombing at the Kremlin. He must now assemble his team to find the real reason for the bombing and stop the other threats which lead from that.

Brad Bird is the director here, and his first live action project is a triumph. He is able to put just enough clarity and suspense in the action scenes that we are never bored by them and give them our full attention. Scenes like the jailbreak at the beginning, the escape from the drowning car, and the sandstorm chase showcase this brilliantly.

There are a couple great scenes here which feel like action scenes since it gets our adrenaline running as we watch, but they are really masterful suspense scenes. The first is the popularly referred to Burj Khafali scene, where Ethan has to climb the outside of the worlds tallest building with nothing but questionably functioning suction gloves. This is a visual spectacle with a tension similar to the white room scene in the first MI film. The second scene actually follows right after this one, where the IMF team must fake two different meetings between enemies simultaneously. There is some very cool spy stuff going on here and some great cat-and-mouse suspense.

This feels like a return to form for the Mission Impossible series. Now, I am a big fan of the first film in the way that it feels like a very authentic, classic spy story, and I felt that the sequels lost that style and tone. Ghost Protocol seems to gain some of that back with some really neat spy tricks (like the hallway screen), but still doesn’t come close to the first film on that level. But it still feels more like Mission Impossible than either of the other sequels so far.

There are some faults, most noticeably Simon Pegg’s overdone comic relief and a pretty weak ending scene at an outdoor bar, but those aren’t enough to deter this excellent movie. Smart and coherent film which reminds us what great action movies can and should be. 9/10