Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol

Now let’s close out “Mission: Impossible Month” with a bang. It’s time to look at “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” which came out in 2011. This is a pretty tricky thing to pull off, but it has been said that Tom Cruise insisted on doing his own stunt work. You can see that when Ethan Hunt ends up looking like Spiderman when he clings to glass, thousands of feet in the air, which you would think would be CGI. It that’s really Tom Cruise, he seems like a suitable case for treatment.

Even it is or isn’t, the sequence is one of the most hypnotizing sections in a film I’ve seen. The late Roger Ebert even admitted, “In the way it's set up, photographed and edited, it provided me and my vertigo with scary fascination.” The movie has other achieved set portions as well. The movie starts out with Ethan Hunt breaking out of a Russian prison. There is an amazing fight scene inside of a space-age parking garage where moving steel platforms lefts and drops cars, and the fighters jump from one floor to another. There’s a smart moment in the vaults of the Kremlin Archives in which a virtual reality delusion is used to trick a guard. And the scene at the fancy Mumbai party where Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor thinks he’s attracting MI team member Jane, played by Paula Patton (I highly doubt she is related to the late General Patton), in a complexly choreographed diversionary procedure.

Ethan and Jane are joined by Mission comrades Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and Benji (Simon Pegg) in an effort to ruin the villain named Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), who has gotten control of a satellite and control of Russian nuclear codes, and wants to start a nuclear war. His reason, from what I have gathered and can be considered a cliché, is that life on Earth needs to be demolished once in a while to start all over, and Hendricks can’t wait for another asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs to come in his lifetime.

The movie benefits greatly from the amazing performances of the Mission team. Cruise, who is in pain from his wife’s death (remember her from the third movie?), plays the likable man of, if we can say, infinite courage. Simon Pegg, with his owl face and bad temper, is funny as the computer genius Benji, one of those men that can walk into the Burj Khalifa with a laptop and immediately takes over the elevators and security cameras. Paula Patton is a charming Jane, combining sweet steaminess with ferocious hand-to-hand fighting techniques. And Jeremy Renner’s Brandt, coming into the story late as an “analyst” for the IMF secretary, played by Tom Wilkinson, is told to have a great many extra-analytical skills.

Brandt and Benji have a scene that arrives at a new level of action absurdity even for a “Mission: Impossible” movie. Brandt’s mission, and Ethan makes it clear that he has to accept it, is to wear steel net underwear and jump into a ventilating shaft with evil spinning fan blades at the bottom. Benji will stop his fall with a little mobile magnet at the bottom of the shaft, so Brandt can hack into massive computers. Renner does a believable job of looking very scared when he does this.

The movie has an unexpected director: Brad Bird, the same man who gave us such classic animated films like “The Iron Giant,” “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille.” Animation concentrates in action, and his films are known for strong characterization, so I think this was a smart choice of Brad Bird. You’d think he was going to be doing thrillers for years.

Now here is what Ebert said about Cruise, who I said was clinging to the side of the Burj Khalifa, supposedly doing his own stunts. “I'm not saying he didn't. No doubt various unseen nets and wires were also used, and at least some CGI. Whatever.” Then again, didn’t Cruise do all of his stunt work in the first movie? Oh well, I guess if you want to believe that Cruise was doing his own stunts in this movie, by all means go ahead because I will.

So that ends “Mission: Impossible Month.” I hope you all enjoyed it and…these reviews will self-destruct in five seconds.
Five, Four, Three, Two, One…GOTCHA!!!!!