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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Release Date: December 16, 2011Language: EnglishGenre: Action, Adventure, Thriller
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton
Mini Review: Ageing stars have a fan following that I fail to understand. They look silly when they play college ‘boys’, leap into their mother’s lap saying, ‘Maa! Main first-class-first aaya hoon!’ (‘Mom! I have graduated summa cum laude!’) while romancing younger and younger female stars....
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Review
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Ageing stars have a fan following that I fail to understand. They look silly when they play college ‘boys’, leap into their mother’s lap saying, ‘Maa! Main first-class-first aaya hoon!’ (‘Mom! I have graduated summa cum laude!’) while romancing younger and younger female stars....
Ageing stars have a fan following that I fail to understand. They look silly when they play college ‘boys’, leap into their mother’s lap saying, ‘Maa! Main first-class-first aaya hoon!’ (‘Mom! I have graduated summa cum laude!’) while romancing younger and younger female stars. Recently Naseeruddin Shah in The Dirty Picture made that point rather well. Clint Eastwood upped the ‘eww!’ factor in Bridges Of Madison County during the lovemaking scene. Thank goodness he chose everything from being behind the camera to playing the irascible old man in Grand Torino.
Tom Cruise my have produced the movie, even performed his own stunts (if you fell for the enormous pre-release publicity), and acted in Ghost Protocol, but should you wish to remember him in Top Gun, A Few Good Men or even in The Last Samurai, don’t go anywhere near this movie.
‘It’s Mission Impossible franchise! How can you say something so blasphemous?’
Yes, the action scenes are there, the gadgets that add the ‘cool’ factor to the agents are there, and the film, just like the others in the series, takes you to exotic locations: inside a Russian prison, the Kremlin, Dubai, and fake India. But the movie rests on such a silly plot that you come away with more respect for Mogambo and Dr. Dang or even the villains in James Bond movies who steal nuclear missiles. Cobolt is such a lame villain...
So why do I not like cobolt of Ghost Protocol?
DEATH OF THE SUPERVILLAIN
If I were a bad guy, armed with ALL the codes to ALL the Russian missiles, and have access to a satellite that can launch ALL the missiles when the codes are fed in, why would I destroy only San Francisco? I would be just as happy to drop one on London, one on China, another on India and put the whole world into chaos, isn’t it? Why would I drop one on San Francisco and hope that the Americans would retaliate and set off the chain reaction? If my idea is to cleanse the world by destroying it, why would I depend on ONE missile to destroy ONE city when I have ALL the missiles at my disposal?
This cobolt guy has no villainous lair, no Mona Darling draped over him, not even the signature cat to stroke! He does the stealing and the feeding of the codes and the bombing and the chasing himself! What happened to nasty henchmen who would waylay the hero and his cronies and thwart all attempts to rescue the heroine?
And it doesn’t help when the bad guy of this film has just been splashed across the billboards around the world as the hero in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
So what you have is a lone psychopath who thinks he is going to destroy the world and be there when it is rebuilt. Erm... who is going to rebuild the world when everyone is dead? We see no nuclear shelter replete with houris and gold and minions... Dash it! Goldmember was a more vicious film than this!
Yes, the action scenes are beautifully shot, especially the very first one when the most interesting looking assassin kills the agent who has stolen the codes from the Russian, and last fight in the automated car parking garage. Now this car park is supposed to be in India (Bombay, if the hopelessly banal shots of the Gateway Of India would have us believe), and the fight sequence is great. But if the audience begins to wonder how Bombay’s sea-salt weather would even allow that kind of gadgetry to be functional for a period longer than six months, before rust would claim the technology, then the action has failed.
Plus the silly lone villain falls to his death in the car park. Hardly a fun way to kill off the bad guy, no? Give me the missile riding terrorist in True Lies or the villain who falls on to an electric transformer in Tango and Cash.
THE REST IS A DAMP SQUIB,
And the interesting looking villain (it’s a girl, she looks like she’s walking the ramp on FTV than anything else) dies ridiculously too. Just when you think a scene where two girls are in combat is going to titillate all fifteen year old males in the audience, the bad girl dies.
Am I spoiling the movie for you? Hardly. There are a few laughs as well. Go see how the ageing star hanging precariously on the hundredth floor of a hotel in dusty Dubai loses a magnetic glove (fancy gadgets that still operate on battery power!) to the winds, but his hair is magically in place. Kudos to the hair and makeup person!
Oh and Anil Kapoor. Ugh! Five minutes is all the screentime he gets. He plays a rich lech, who gets roughed up by the female agent. You know Hollywood has begun to recognise the ticket buying power of the people in the subcontinent, but putting our Jhakaas guy in such a lame role is just unforgivable. Anil Kapoor joins likes of Aishwarya Rai and Mallika Sherawat who made fools of themselves by claiming that Hollywood really loved them.
ONLY FOR DIE HARD MI FANS.
I don’t care how amazing the action sequences were. If the story and treatment made me want to go home and watch Bourne trilogy, then something somewhere has failed. And yes, you can wait for it to appear on your TV, with Anil Kapoor’s accompanying commentary on the action sequences and how amazing working in Hollywood was...
Plot
This is not just another mission. The IMF is shut down when it's implicated in a global terrorist bombing plot. Ghost Protocol is initiated and Ethan Hunt and his rogue new team must go undercover to clear their organization's name. No help, no contact, off the grid.
Critic's reviews
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Owen Gleiberman - Entertainment Weekly
Ghost Protocol brims with scenes that are exciting and amazing at the same time; they're brought off with such casual aplomb that they're funny, too.
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Andrew O'Hehir - Salon.com
The most exciting action flick of the year, by a huge margin.
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Peter Rainer - Christian Science Monitor
A very good thrill ride and Cruise is better than he's been in a long time.
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Keith Phipps - The A.V. Club
As Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there's anyone out there who can top him.
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Peter Travers - Rolling Stone
It's implausible as hell, but no less fun for that.
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Claudia Puig - USA Today
Oscar-winning animator Brad Bird seems to have accomplished the impossible with the fourth Mission: Impossible installment by injecting the 15-year-old series with newfound, breathtaking energy.
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Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
A terrific thriller with action sequences that function as a kind of action poetry.
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Rene Rodriguez - Miami Herald
The wait for a great action movie is finally over. Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol is pure popcorn of the highest, most flavorful order, and it's good for you, too.
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Dan Kois - Slate
Should you see Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol? By all means, and in the big, big, biggest theater you can find.
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Bill Goodykoontz - Arizona Republic
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is big, it's loud and so relentless in its action that it reminds me of an old joke. Why do you hit yourself in the head with a hammer? Because it feels so good when you stop. In this case, the headache is worth it.
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James Rocchi - Boxoffice Magazine
Mission: Impossible 4 is so well-made and smooth you may need to see it more than once to truly appreciate its brains and nerves and blood.
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Joe Williams - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The world-class mechanic is Brad Bird, who applies the pacing and spatial freedom of a 'toon to a live-action thriller.
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Lou Lumenick - New York Post
The film also wastes the coiled intensity of Jeremy Renner, as the newest member of the IMF team with a none-too-compelling past. Bird does keep audiences guessing whether Renner is the only leading actor in Hollywood who's even shorter than Cruise.
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James Berardinelli - ReelViews
Ghost Protocol is big and brassy, doing many of the things its predecessors did but, in the words of Nigel Tufnel, turning them up to "11."
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Ian Buckwalter - NPR
This film exists purely to dazzle and thrill, and by that measure, it delivers expertly, never lagging despite a lengthy 133-minute running time.
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Amy Biancolli - San Francisco Chronicle
If you widen your eyes and turn off your brain, it all adds up to cracking good fun.
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Steven Rea - Philadelphia Inquirer
Has a certain cartoonish vibe. That's OK, because Brad Bird's brand of toonage (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) owes much to the rigors and traditions of live action, not only in the way he references other films, but also in his visual approach - sweeping, swooping camera pans, wide vistas, jolting perspective.
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Wesley Morris - Boston Globe
Bird also really punches up the ensemble playing. I imagine one of the upsides of being the director of nonhuman beings is that you're trained to respond to characters as much as stars.
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Nick Pinkerton - Village Voice
If the M:I films are immune to the tarnish on the Cruise brand, it's precisely because their spectacle requires us to be impressed by Ethan Hunt, not to like him.
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J.R. Jones - Chicago Reader
As usual with the series, the movie combines a plot line a toddler could understand with gadgets that would baffle an engineering Ph.D.
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Manohla Dargis - The New York Times
Gets back to action basics with globe-trotting, nifty gadgets, high-flying stunts and less loquacious villainy.
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Kenneth Turan - Los Angeles Times
Bird has done a stylish and involving job here, turning in an entertaining production that's got considerable visual flair, especially in its action-heavy Imax sections.
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Joe Morgenstern - Wall Street Journal
It's not the generic plot that's so memorable, even though its convolutions are clever enough, or the cast of mostly interesting characters, but the surreal swirl of form and color that frequently fills the enormous screen.
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Jen Yamato - Movieline
A well-heeled French assassin chick who murders in exchange for diamonds? So '90s-era rejected Bond script, guys.
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Todd McCarthy - The Hollywood Reporter
The impact of spectacular action on striking international locales is moderated somewhat by the repetitive nature of the challenges faced by this rebooted team of American agents.
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Justin Chang - Variety
Pixar wizard Brad Bird's live-action debut serves up sights and setpieces of often jaw-dropping ingenuity and visual flair, but it's a movie of dazzling individual parts that don't come together to fully satisfying effect in the final stretch.
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Marc Savlov - Austin Chronicle
Left me with the feeling I've seen much of this before. It's not that I'd like something better, it's just that I'd like something new.
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Liam Lacey - The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
The movie rolls on, with more clever but increasingly repetitive action sequences that entertain, but drain the film of any credible sense of jeopardy.
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Ann Hornaday - Washington Post
There's a place in the movies for wish fulfillment, no doubt, including the wish for it all to be over.
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Michael Phillips - Chicago Tribune
Bird has serious promise outside the animation realm; in "Ghost Protocol" he errs, I think, by shoving the camera too close to the bodies in the frame, so that the momentum and spatial relationships become awfully hard to parse.
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Richard Corliss - Time
Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol is no "Fast Five."
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Nick de Semlyen - Empire
Still not an essential series like Bourne or Bond, but this entry has a refreshingly light touch and some of the best action of 2011. See it at an IMAX for optimal vertigo-inducing effect.
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Elizabeth Weitzman - New York Daily News
The only thing that's missing, in fact, is a soul. On the other hand, there's a good chance you'll get so caught up in what they're doing, you won't even notice how stiff and inhuman the actors appear.
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Keith Uhlich - Time Out New York
Well, Ghost Protocol ultimately ends up as an eye-rollingly towering totem to L. Ron's favorite son, complete with treacly music cues and longing glances - bromantic and otherwise - that will send you screaming into the thetan-stealing clutches of Lord Xenu.
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Steve Persall - St. Petersburg Times
The strategy deserves to self-destruct in five seconds.
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Jaime N. Christley - Slant Magazine
The Mission: Impossible franchise seems almost crudely mercenary in its formula for success.
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User Reviews
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Amith Ail - December 27, 2011
Worth a watch.... Mind-blowing stunts and cool gizmos... Would have loved to watch the stunts at the Burj in 3D...
Photos
Videos
Cast
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Tom Cruise
as Ethan Hunt
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Jeremy Renner
as Brandt
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Simon Pegg
as Benji Dunn
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Paula Patton
as Jane Carter
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Tom Wilkinson
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Ving Rhames
as Luther Stickell
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Josh Holloway
as Trevor Hanaway
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Michael Nyqvist
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Léa Seydoux
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Anil Kapoor
as Brij Nath
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Darren Shahlavi
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Vladimir Mashkov
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Samuli Edelmann
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Miraj Grbic
as Bogdan
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Ivan Shvedoff
as Leonid Lisenker
Crew
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Brad Bird
Director
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J J Abrams
Producer
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Bryan Burk
Producer
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Jeffrey Chernov
executive producer
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Tom Cruise
Producer
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David Ellison
executive producer
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David Minkowski
co-producer: Czech Republic
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Tabrez Noorani
line producer: India
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Christopher Mcquarrie
Writer
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Michael Giacchino
Music Director
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Paul Hirsch
Editor
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Robert Elswit
Cinematography
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Michael Diner
Art Director
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Helen Jarvis
Art Director
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Christa Munro
Art Director
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Michael Turner
Art Director
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Martin Vackar
Art Director
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Grant Van Der Slagt
Art Director
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