Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (***½)

Directed by: Brad Bird

Starring: Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Samuli Edelman, Anil Kapoor, Josh Holloway, Lea Seydoux, Tom Wilkinson, Ving Rhames

Seen: December 16^th 2011

***½ Out of ****

Without having seen an episode of the 1966-1973 TV-series, I am a massive fan of the Mission: Impossible franchise. The first movie remains my personal favourite, but I have to say that Ghost Protocol came very close to knocking it off its perch, with the third movie just slightly below it (I try to erase thoughts of the second movie from my mind, that was an unfortunate misstep). Ghost Protocol is the flashiest movie of the series, featuring some of the craziest and most unbelievable stunts and action sequences, keeping you on the edge of your seat for over two hours.

Ghost Protocol starts with an absolute bang, IMF Agent Hanaway (Holloway) bursting from a door followed by two henchmen, jumping from a roof and awesomely surviving it, before being shot by the blonde assassin Sabine Moreau (Seydoux) just as he is warned of her identity. The team was after Cobalt, a genius terrorist intent on achieving peace through some extremely nihilistic thinking. Jane Carter (Patton) and Benji Dunn (Pegg) are now in dire need of a new team member, and they manage to obtain him in the form of Ethan Hunt (Cruise), but not after breaking him out of a maximum security Moscow prison. Hunt and his team go after Cobalt’s identity by brilliantly breaking into the Kremlin, but are surprised as Cobalt is not only there too, but ready to turn their mission into a failure with international ramifications. Cobalt destroys the Kremlin, with the blame falling squarely on Hunt and his team’s shoulders.

While the previous movies only threatened Hunt and his team with being disavowed, this movie starts with it, the president having invoked Ghost Protocol because of the Kremlin bombing. Ethan is approached by the secretary of the IMF (Wilkinson), and while being handed his new mission to restore the status quo, they’re assaulted by Russian forces on Hunt’s tail and the secretary is killed, Hunt and Brandt (Renner), the secretary’s analyst, only escaping through some quick thinking by Hunt. The four-member team must go after Cobalt and his wildly dangerous associates while staying ahead of Russian police and preventing Cobalt (Nyqvist) from obtaining nuclear launch codes to accompany the nuclear launch control device he stole from the Kremlin. The team move from exotic location to exotic location as they try to intercept the nuclear launch codes in Dubai in a massively tense sequence involving Hunt scaling the outside of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, and then head off to Mumbai in an attempt to cut off Cobalt as he plans to launch a nuclear missile targeted at San Francisco. The action is unrelenting and the exposition coherent enough (and interesting enough) to keep the plot rolling along at a steady pace.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is a fantastic movie, a visual spectacle from the first minute up to the moment the credits roll across the screen. Tom Cruise runs like the wind, this time from a massive desert sandstorm in Dubai, and he does the craziest stunts, this time most notably scaling the Burj Khalifa, on the outside. Paula Patton and Simon Pegg add the necessary sizzle and humour with Michael Nyqvist, Samuli Edelman and Lea Seydoux chilling the veins as the villains. There are exciting franchise familiarities, as the movie had me at “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”, and a scene featuring Jeremy Renner hovering above a massive turbine immediately reminds of the Langley server room scene from the first movie, which gave a jolt of excitement over and above what the movie was already peppering me with.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is very close to being the best in the franchise, and I enjoyed it immensely – you can’t go wrong deciding to watch this spectacular action movie, a welcome continuance of an exhilarating franchise.