Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol: The 4th Mission: Impossible film to date, stretching way back to 1995, with Tom Cruise back as uber-spy Ethan Hunt, who is broken out of a Russian prison to track down a nuclear extremist bent on setting off “beneficial” nuclear war to bring about peace. This sends him running around the globe with a team of disavowed cohorts, including Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, and Jeremy Renner, to Dubai, Mumbai, Moscow, and beyond to stop an impending nuclear attack. This is the first live-action film of director Brad Bird, who is well regarded for his animated films (he gave us “The Iron Giant”, and Pixar’s “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles”). J.J. Abrams, who directed the third MI film, is back producing. It’s ambitious as all get-out and starts cracking before the credits end and doesn’t let up until the final five minutes, with several well-staged action set pieces including an extended sequence involving the Al-Burj Khalifa hotel in Dubai and an Indian automated parking garage. This is easily Cruise’s best film in quite some time and he underplays Hunt this time around, with large swaths of the film passing without any dialogue from him. He’s also showing a few more wrinkles and a few hitches in his giddy-up (in his defense, he’s durn near 50), but with plenty of high-tech toys in tow. Pegg and Renner provide comic relief that never overstays its welcome and Patton acquits herself well as the only female on the team. And for a movie that clocks in about 2 hours 15 minutes, it actually feels LONGER because it’s extremely busy. This is my personal favorite of the MI movies – perfect escapist fare. Wildly improbable? Absolutely, but that’s why we go to the movies. Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”
