Yes, this was the first Mission: Impossible film I watched. And am I glad that it was.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol was released in the United States on December 21, 2011. It was directed by Brad Bird (director of Ratatouille and The Incredibles), produced by Bryan Burk, Tom Cruise, and J.J. Abrams, had music composed by Michael Giacchino, and starring Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, and Paula Patton. It is the fourth installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise and the follow-up to Mission: Impossible III.
You'd think that after four movies, people would start to be getting tired of this franchise. But this series of films just kept getting better and better until we reached Ghost Protocol. This was a very fun and tense movie for me throughout the entire film, and the cinematography intrigued me the whole time. In fact, I read an article saying that if you saw the film in IMAX, the Burj Khalifa shot where Ethan's about to jump off is one of the best shots ever. I instantly wished I would have been old enough and had enough money to see that in IMAX.
From what I could tell, this movie is a series of failures followed by the final success at the end, prompting my parents to say, "Fourth time's a charm." I very much agree with this statement in that we don't necessarily want to see the remaining IMF members fail and fail again. We want to see them fail once or twice at the most, then succeed and everybody goes home happy. However, I will say that even though Ethan Hunt's team failed in their mission again and again, they made the absolute most out of what they had. This movie was great.
The cast was, for the most part, phenomenal. Although Tom Cruise did not cut his hair for this movie, making him sort of look like Tom Brady from the back, he delivered a very solid performance. Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg are two of the most undervalued actors in today's time, with Renner getting unfairly bumped down for Hawkeye and the Bourne crossover and Pegg being a very good comedian and delivering the comic relief at just the right time. And then we get to Paula Patton.
Oh boy.
Paula Patton, while being a very attractive woman, as she showed in the movie, is just not an actress. She really could only make one kind of facial expression and, for the most part, I felt like she was just there in sort of a forced role.
We finish up with the actors, and then we arrive at the script. There were countless shots where Ethan should have and would have died if not for the script, which demands Ethan be put through unimaginable peril, but this is too much. When he banged his head really hard on the Burj when he was trying to get back down to his floor, he should've died right then and there. Same deal with the car manufacturing place at the end of the movie. Ethan Hunt is not Superman, but the script unintentionally makes him so.
At the end of the day, Ghost Protocol was a very entertaining and gripping action thriller and by far the best of the Mission: Impossible films. While there are a few flaws, I would recommend watching this movie and see Ethan and team kick butt like a bunch of bosses.
Final Grade: B
My next review will be of the latest Pixar film and possibly the most critically and financially disappointing one, November's The Good Dinosaur. Look for that very soon. Comment on this article on what your favorite Mission: Impossible film is, and what you want me to review in the future.
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