Rating of
3/4
MI-4 - Ethan Hunt Is Back!
MovieMike - wrote on 12/22/11
Tom Cruise is back for a fourth turn as Ethan Hunt, an IMF operative who is yet again thrown into a seemingly doomed mission. One might think that this film would be just more of the same, which is exactly what I had expected walking into this. I’m glad to say I was proven at least somewhat wrong - more on that in a bit. In keeping with the previous three installments, a different director, Brad Bird, is at the helm for Ghost Protocol. What makes this a surprising and unexpected choice is that Mr. Bird’s previous directorial credits are mostly for animation (‘Ratatouille’, ‘The Incredibles’). Not to worry, J.J. Abrams is one of the producers and much of the action presented here seems to have his touch as well.
The story in Ghost Protocol starts off in high gear with chases and an agent being gunned down. Tom Cruise gets sprung from an Eastern European prison and begins working the case; only to walk into a set-up that blows up a big chunk of the Kremlin. Immediately the IMF is implicated and the entire team is disavowed. Ethan and his small group of agents must expose the real terrorists to clear their names.
The cast includes Paula Patton (‘Déjà vu’, ‘Hitch’) as an IMF agent with a vendetta of her own. Simon Pegg is back as the nerdish tech wizard, who has now graduated to full field agent (much to Ethan’s chagrin). Rounding out the team is Jeremy Renner (‘Hurt Locker’, ‘The Town’) another agent who previously withdrew from service for reasons to be revealed. The principal bad guy in this is Michael Nyqvist (a principal in the original Swedish export ‘Girl With The Dragon Tatoo’)
One of the other ‘stars’ of this film has to be the Burj Khalifa, the current world’s tallest building in Dubai, Arab Emirates. A portion of the action in Ghost Protocol takes place up high and on the outside of this building. The camera shots used for these sequences will definitely have you white-knuckling the armrests of your theater seat. In keeping with those scenes, much of the action in this movie is over the top.
As for what keeps this from being just a rehash of the previous MI films, is that while previous story lines relied heavily on the agents’ specialized gadgets and technologies, in this outing several of those futuristic devices fail to work as expected and the team has to improvise more than once to get the job done. Those glitches help amp up the intensity of the story and keep the audience guessing on where things are headed.
While the ‘Ghost Protocol’ story as written would not stand up to very close scrutiny, it still manages to keep things moving at a brisk pace - it delivers just what most action junkies come to see. While not a perfect film, I have to give credit to this installment in keeping the premise fresh and to be certain, the door is left open for perhaps another installment… should you chose to accept it!
