Brad Bird made his name with two brilliant animated films, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Mission Impossible 4 is his first live-action picture and confirms he is a first-rate director.
There are three sequences - a break from a Russian prison, a hazardous climb up the tallest building in the world (it’s in Dubai) and a climactic fight in an automated multi- storey car park in Mumbai - that rank among the best not just of the year, but of all time.
It’s these that make Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol superior to the other films in this series, and very much worth the price of admission. See it, if you can, on an Imax screen where the stunts are at their most breathtaking.
The story, regrettably, is a routine affair. Yet another madman is intent on bringing about a world war, and he’s even less well motivated than Professor Moriarty was in Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. He’s called Kurt Hendricks, and is played uninterestingly by Michael Nykvist.
Apparently, this nutter’s belief is that only when the world has succumbed to nuclear annihilation will there be lasting peace. It’s a miracle he can get anyone to be his homicidal henchmen.
Hendricks starts off the shenanigans by employing a glamorous hit-woman (Lea Seydoux) to assassinate an American agent. He then blows up the Kremlin and pins the blame on America - specifically agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Simon Pegg and Paula Patton).
After the death-by-explosion of their boss (Tom Wilkinson), Hunt and co know they are on their own as rogue agents, though, as usual in this series, they never seem to suffer from any shortage of money or hi-tech gadgetry. Off they go to Dubai and India to confront Hendricks and his maniacal minions.
Ethan’s only other allies are an American security analyst who is suspiciously proficient in a fight (Jeremy Renner from The Hurt Locker) and a few foreign pals sportingly willing to help him save the planet from nuclear catastrophe.
Major faults remain from the first three pictures. Ethan Hunt must be the blandest, most boring action hero in modern cinema, and Cruise gives him a steely self-confidence that make you half-wish he would fail. His sidekicks aren’t much better. Patton has little to do except look sexy, and Pegg is there to play the nerd and provide comic relief, but we’ve seen him do this before in Star Trek.
Renner has the nearest thing to a complex acting role and works hard to make us suspect there’s more to him than meets the eye. But his back story turns out to be less than riveting or revealing.
The shape of the screenplay and cheesy attempts at flippant wisecracks are familiar from too many Bond films, and it’s curious to see a modern film still peddling a view of Russian-American relations that dates from the Cold War.
Fortunately, the directing has verve and technical sophistication. Bird’s sense of excitement and fun conquers all.
It has to be said, too, that Cruise ‘ though nearing 50 ‘still looks every inch the action hero. Fifteen years after the first Mission Impossible, he continues to hang off tall buildings with commendable conviction - and you’ll feel you’re up there with him.
No one is going to pretend this film is deep or meaningful, even by action movie standards. But at its best it really is pretty awesome. - Daily Mail