Once again, I’ve arrived late to a film series. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is the only one of the four MI movies I’ve seen, and while it’s a satisfactory action film—albeit technologically over-inflated to provide the spectacle that current audiences seem to demand—I don’t believe I missed any narrative nuances by not having watched the first three pictures, nor do I have any intention or desire to go back and see what I missed.
Why didn’t I watch the other Mission Impossible films when they were released? Partly because they simply didn’t appeal to me—I assumed they were slick and anodyne Hollywood action films and I like ‘em “edgy”—and partly because I tend to conflate Tom Cruise’s onscreen roles with his annoying (to me) real-life personality, and that made his movies difficult for me to enjoy. I generally don’t confuse other performers’ screen characters with their less-than-savoury real lives (cf, Mel Gibson), so I suppose I was being rather shallow in this case. Truth be told, Cruise is fine in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (it’s not a “Tom Cruise vehicle,” but has a rather decent ensemble cast) and I hereby apologise for my narrow-mindedness.
MI:GP is constructed around a fistful of set-pieces: chases, fights, explosions, or “capers” (which often result in chases and/or fights and/or explosions). That’s fine, this isn’t intended to be an especially cerebral or even dramatic film: the script exists to place the protagonists in the aforementioned situations, not to provoke the audience into thinking or anything (heaven forefend). Some psycho wants to bamboozle the super-powers into starting a nuclear war with each other, to cleanse the Earth of the bad stuff (i.e., everything). He needs launch codes so he can trick a Soviet sub into firing the first missile, then he needs a satellite uplink to contact the sub, then he needs to prevent the IMF (no, not the International Monetary Fund, the Impossible Mission Force) from pressing the “destruct” button and stopping his flying nuke before it reaches its destination. The IMF fails miserably in their first two innings (to be fair, they’re operating under the—dun dun DUN—“Ghost Protocol,” which means they’re on their own, no help from above), but get the job done when it counts. Well, two out of three isn’t bad for a madman bent on global destruction, I guess. He did his best, and that’s all we can ask for.
The film leaps from Moscow (prison riot, sneaking into Kremlin, big explosion, car chase) to Dubai (climbing world’s tallest building, fooling two groups of terrorists, sandstorm car chase) to Mumbai (sneaking into facility, car chase, sneaking into another facility, fighting in automated car park). Interestingly enough, while one of the staples of the franchise (and the action film genre as a whole, especially in the 21st century) is technology, MI-GP goes out of its way to depict the fallibility of technology. Nearly every gadget utilised by our quartet of protagonists fails at some crucial point, a clever gambit by the screenwriters.
The script also contains wry, understated humour. Some of this is character-generated, some is verbal quips, and some is primarily visual. One of my favourite examples of the latter occurs as Ethan is climbing the outside of the Burj Khalifa (world’s tallest building, hello) using a pair of magnetic (or something) gloves. One of them malfunctions (of course, see previous paragraph) and Ethan tosses it away, only to later see it clinging to the side of the building…and then fizzle out and drop off into the void. No big deal, but clever enough to elicit an appreciative smile from me.
The characterisations of Ethan, sexy woman agent (Paula Patton), outsider guy (Jeremy Renner), and comic relief ginger (Simon Pegg), as well as main crazy-guy villain, secondary bearded villain, villainous woman assassin, Russian sort-of-villain, and so on, are thin but serviceable (as are the performances). Hardly anyone has a minute to take a breath, let alone start soliloquising about their lives, hopes, and dreams (although Renner’s character gets one “drama” moment where he talks about a failed mission). I realise I’ve criticised other films for giving us perfunctory scripts and paper-thin characters, but Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol fills in the gaps with its breakneck pace and technical dazzle.
MI-GP was directed by Brad Bird, an alumnus of “The Simpsons” who makes his live-action directorial debut here. I’ve never been entirely clear on the duties of an animation director, but I don’t think this position is especially similar to directing actual people. In an animated film, the animators draw what they’re told to draw, the writers write, the voice artists speak. Presumably the director oversees this process in a creative way, but the control over the project seems immeasurably greater than on an actual film (and MI-GP isn’t even one of those CGI-heavy projects which are practically cartoons themselves). Maybe I’m wrong, and Bird is hardly the first person to make the transition (Frank Tashlin did it in the 1950s, and Wes Anderson went the other direction with The Fantastic Mr. Fox). MI-GP is slick and exciting and to give Bird credit, the action scenes (especially the fights) are largely devoid of the fragmented editing, shaky-cam nonsense which has become all too prevalent in contemporary cinema. We actually get to see people running and punching and falling and shooting and ducking and so on, instead of the almost subliminal, what-was-that, short-attention-span-generation style that spoils a lot of action sequences elsewhere.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did not see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol in an IMAX cinema. I can imagine it’s probably rather impressive in this format, although it was fine in the version I saw. Although I shan’t go into my usual spiel about film’s unceasing quest to reproduce the illusion of actual experience via technology, until virtual reality devices are perfected, we’ll be exposed to more and more of this ultra-tech wizardry. IMAX theatres were initially used to showcase documentaries, and now that the process (and other technology such as 3D) is being employed for fictional films, there is always the danger of the visuals overwhelming the story (I’ve already groused a tad about excessive pictorialism in The Adventures of Tin Tin).
But however thin its plot and however overwhelming its action sequences, MI-GP succeeds in imparting a sense of empathy, suspense, and tension as well as pure kinetic excitement to the audience, suggesting that the filmmakers were careful to remember that, after all, a film needs a spark of humanity. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a slick, professional, superficial but extremely satisfying action movie.
