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 Even though Brad Bird directed The Iron Giant (arguably the best film in a year, 1999, rife with great films), even though he's responsible for the best Fantastic Four flick there ever will be (The Incredibles) as well as the best overall Pixar release (Ratatouille), I still had the chutzpah to be skeptical when I heard that his live-action debut would be the fourth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise. I am contrite. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (hereafter Ghost Protocol) is the model of the modern action picture. It has exactly two quiet moments (I counted)--the rest is audacious, ostentatious, glorious action set against not only the expected fisticuffs but also a ferocious sandstorm in Dubai and the bombing and partial collapse of the Kremlin. It's an honorary Bond movie better than any of them (only the Casino Royale redux enters the same conversation--well, maybe On Her Majesty's Secret Service, too), filled to stuffed with clever gadgets (and their logical application), exotic locales, beautiful women, and fast cars. It's sexy, sleek, knows better than to take its foot off the pedal, flirts with relevance without ever attempting depth it's not equipped to deal with, and establishes J.J. Abrams as better than idol Spielberg in the producing-good-action-movies sweepstakes. Not content to scale just any building, it has returning hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) climb the Burj Khalifa; not content to stage a brawl in a parking garage, it finds one of those robotic ones to provide a third dimension to the scrambling in vintage, brilliant, 1980s Hong Kong style. In a series that boasts John Woo as director of its first sequel, Ghost Protocol has the big, giant clanking ones to outdo Woo.
Cut off from their support when the warning of disavowel embedded in all IMF ("Impossible Mission Force," duh) mission descriptions comes to explosive fruition and tasked to stop a crazy Russian intellectual (Michael Nyqvist) from "evolving" mankind through nuclear fire, Ethan's team this time around consists of hacker Benji (Simon Pegg), aggrieved agent Jane (Paula Patton), and mysterious analyst Brandt (Jeremy Renner). Actually, it doesn't matter what Ghost Protocol is about so much as how it's about it. Take the prologue set-piece, a Russian prison break that somehow references Oldboy in its controlled violence. Subsequent sequences recall Cruise's own Minority Report, while other moments place the picture into context at the end of a long line of superlative entertainments it doesn't surpass, exactly, but collects with the efficiency and passion of a fan. It's the same kind of film as producer J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot, in that it knows the notes and hears the music as well. I even like that Cruise's performance is almost identical to the one he gives in the unfairly maligned Knight and Day: a parody of the indestructible action hero. And why not? In a throwaway line about the American government bypassing due process when it comes to suspected terrorists, it presents its only irony, however brief, along the way to offering up the absolute superiority of American technological might. In its doomsday scenario perpetrated by a rogue instead of a government, the picture plays comfortably into a popular theme in this year's films of the world blowing up and maybe not a lot of us noticing much of a difference. The star of Ghost Protocol is Bird. Forged in animation, Bird is notably respectful of the relationship between objects in a frame and, given the blueprint of The Incredibles, his action choreography carries real weight and bristles with invention. It all translates, who knew? Seen in IMAX, Ghost Protocol offers the best use of that technology since The Dark Knight--although when Ethan is swallowed in a wall of sand, the image that lingers is of him remembering a pair of goggles in his pocket and putting them on. It's a moment of utility, of intelligence, that reminded me a lot of a similar throwaway gesture from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke in which the hero bends down next to a stream to collect some water and casually slings his bow across his shoulders and chest. Miyazaki is, of course, one of Bird's heroes, and what's so gratifying about Ghost Protocol is how transparent Bird is as an artist, drawing his lines true and straight from this film back to his influences. He's an auteur without any arrogance, a specifically American filmmaker. Compare it to the oddly-similar Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows for crystal-clarity of how to do something like this the right way, how easy it is to fall right on your face, and how Bird makes it look so very simple.-Walter Chaw
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
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Published: December 16, 2011
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