Rating of
3/4
"Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 11/20/12
The IMF are framed for an explosion in the Kremlin and the entire organisation is disavowed, leaving Ethan Hunt and his team alone to expose a fanatic bent on nuclear Armageddon as the true culprit. I've never been the biggest fan of the Mission: Impossible franchise as a whole; the first was okay at the time but looked very dated in the wake of Jason Bourne's re-energisation of the action thriller, the second was typical of John Woo's daft excesses and the third took itself way too seriously to be fun. Ghost Protocol however manages to get the balance just right; the character dynamic works much better than in the previous films, with Simon Pegg's tech geek providing plenty of amusing banter without becoming a comic stooge and there is some quite spectacular stunt work. The plot is once again little more than a series of well engineered heists, but the characters are likeable, the pacing breathless and tense and it all slots together like a quality modern day James Bond film. A pleasant surprise.
