Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
12/27/11
The
Mission: Impossible movie franchise was born at a uniquely
strange time in the evolution of the modern blockbuster, when studios had
begun to fully commit to raiding their vaults for remakes and adaptations
of TV series but had not yet gotten a clue that it was the fans of those
pre-existing properties that were their target audience. As such,
M:I, the popular late-60’s espionage series about a team of agents
became a star vehicle for Tom Cruise who played a team of one in Brian
DePalma’s diverting but forgettable flick that made sure no one confused
the filmmakers with fans of the series by allowing original IMF leader
Jim Phelps (then played by Jon Voigt) to die only after revealing he was
a traitor. But either way, money rolled in and a franchise without
a direction or purpose was born. Latching on to Hong Kong director
John Woo’s success with Face/Off, he was hired to helm Mission:
Impossible 2, a laughable unintentional parody of his best work that
again grossed money hand over fist but left Cruise and the Paramount suits
knowing they still needed to find some kind of point and direction for
his cypherous IMF hero Ethan Hunt. Enter JJ Abrams, the TV mogul
looking to make his feature directorial debut. He and the team responsible
for the cult TV series Alias finally licked the whole Mission:
Impossible thing with M:I3, which gave Hunt a wife, a life,
friends, a workplace and, dare I say it, stakes. Then something really
nasty happened: a series of PR missteps caused Cruise to fall out
of favor with the public and it seemed that the underperforming sequel
would be Hunt’s swan song. But that’s the thing about franchises,
they provide actors with a safe harbor during the valleys of their careers
and under the producorial eye of Abrams, with many of the Alias
team intact and Incredibles animation wiz Brad Bird making his live
action directorial debut, the series finally hits a new high note five
and a half years later with Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol,
which does everything the original M:I got wrong right, building
a solid team in a slam-bang espionage thriller packed with amazing stunts.
Most of all, it really understands the human dynamic necessary to make
an action blockbuster run. Who cares if Ethan Hunt prevails if he’s
an indestructible superman? But if it takes everything he’s got to
turn his amp to 11… well, THAT’S a movie hero, and Mission: Impossible-Ghost
Protocol is a globetrotting spy action flick of the highest order.
Impossible
Missions Force agent Hanaway (Josh Holloway) retrieves a package containing
nuclear launch codes and then races for a rendezvous with teammates Jane
(Paula Patton) and Benji (Simon Pegg). Just before she reaches him,
he’s gunned down by assassin Sabine (Lea Seydoux), who grabs the codes
and escapes. Jane and Benji are then dispatched to break Ethan Hunt
(Tom Cruise) out of a Russian prison, and once they’re out, it’s a race
to the Kremlin to intercept a mysterious terrorist bent on securing and
detonating a nuclear weapon. The mission is a debacle: not
only does the terrorist escape, he brings down half the Russian capital
in the process. The IMF is blamed and all its agents are disavowed.
Russian agent Sidorov (Vladimir Mashkov) is in hot pursuit of the fleeing
Hunt and his people inadvertantly gun down the IMF Secretary (and uncredited
Tom Wilkinson) and leave Ethan on the run with one of his analysts, Brandt
(Jeremy Renner). They rendezvous with Benji and Jane knowing that
they must scavenge what IMF technology they can and make a beeline to Dubai.
There the terrorist, mad genius Henricks (Michael Nyqvist) is en route
to purchase the launch codes and enact his dream of a nuclear war he believes
will bring peace to the Earth. With no satellites, no backup and
some really shoddy inventions, the final Impossible Missions team is all
that stands between us and the end of the world.
It
took so long and such unique circumstances to blow away the dust and ego
from the original M:I that Ghost Protocol is that rarest
of fourquels: one that’s not only the best of the franchise to date,
but that feels more like what these movies should have been about in the
first place than any of its predecessors. The problem with real-world
spycraft is that it’s gotten so good as to be wildly uncinematic:
all those satellites that can read license plates, computers that can instantly
call up bios on any living human and magic toys that give secret agents
de facto superpowers are all pretty cool, but they also take a lot of the
guesswork and desperation out of trying to save the world. So it’s
a fun change of pace to take away the massive support network and make
Ethan Hunt and friends earn this one the old fashioned way. M:I-GP
writers Josh Appelbaum & Andre Nemec (both Alias veterans) go
that a step farther by imagining a budget-crunched present in which even
a fully functional IMF has gone to seed. Hunt gets his initial orders
from a hilariously lame automated message he has to go back and smack so
it will self-destruct like it’s supposed to, and while Benji is able to
salvage a lot of cool-sounding gear from the team’s last remaining cache
of weapons, just about all of it is junk. It’s bad enough when the
machine that makes the plastic masks malfunctions so Ethan and Jane have
to go into a room pretending to be other people and hoping their marks
have never met the real ones, but when he’s climbing the tallest building
in the world (Dubai’s Burj Khalifa Tower) with super-stick gloves and one
of them stops sticking… well, that makes being a super-agent a LOT tougher.
Cruise
dramatically upgraded his performance the last time out, but in Ghost
Protocol, he’s really got Hunt licked: in the grand tradition
of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, he’s got a bug-eyed “You’ve GOT to be
kidding me!” reaction shot for each time he’s got to push it that much
harder to get the job done. And this mission pushed him about as
far as any person could possibly go, trying to outrun exploding Kremlins
and dust storms, dodging flying vehicles and enduring an absolutely insane
climax at an Indian automotive dealership where all the cars are on hydraulic
platforms that require him to leap impossible distances and seemingly get
whacked in the jaw 35 times… and that’s before he comes up with a really
novel way to jump 50 feet and survive. The best stunt-based action
movies know how to put their heroes through the wringer, but M:I4
may very well set a new standard. And in this day and age, Hunt should
know better than to try to ice his victory with a catchphrase.
That
Bird (who mounts the action scenes with consummate skill made even more
astonishing by the fact that he’s never directed an object that wasn’t
inside a computer before) and company are able to make Hunt an underdog
is quite a triumph, but it helps that his team (aside from Patton, who
does well with a stock role) is a bit on the shaggy side themselves.
Renner’s here to add some starpower to the franchise, but I was pleasantly
surprised to see that Brandt is no superman: he’s got skills, but
he also harbors a dark secret that’s knocked him out of action and into
a desk job, and none of the movie’s characters fears all that defective
junk more than he does. And Pegg’s Benji (returning from M:I3)
is an enthusiastic goofball who may or may not be cut out for life outside
the lab. Nyqvist is appropriately steely and diabolical, Mashkov
and Holloway bring a lot of character to what could have been small stock
roles, and Anil Kapoor is a hoot as a TV mogul who never does quite figure
out that his business is right at the center of looming Armageddon.
Mission:
Impossible-Ghost Protocol is electrifying and fun, pretty much everything
you could ask for from an espionage thriller and more than you could ask
for from a Mission: Impossible movie. At this pace,
by M:I6, you might be looking at Citizen Kane… |
