Five years after the last Mission Impossible edition hit theatres, and three since that hilarious Scientology video that declared “We are the authorities on getting people off drugs, we are the authorities on the mind” went viral, Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt. And in a movie that doesn’t need actors so much as action figures, he saves the world yet again.
After an IMF agent gets killed by hired assassin Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux), his sexy boss Jane Carter (Paula Patton) decides to trek halfway across the world, and unleash the imprisoned Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) on evil. Their mission – to track down a person of interest code-named Cobalt, whose secret files are housed in a very insecure Kremlin.
An explosion later, a newly-disavowed (a.k.a. ghost protocolled) IMF ends up going to Dubai and India to save the world from nuclear war. Money: No worries, the producer has bundles of greens – enough to make a 2 hour 15 minute movie. Gadgets: They look awesome, but tend to malfunction. Hollywood can’t let go of the era where Russians were the enemy, and Russia and India were joint at the hip and lip.
But, of course, nothing goes according to plan, and Hunt, Carter, analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and tech guy Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) set off on a globe trot as they chase down Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist). It’s bad enough that Hendricks wants to destroy the world – whaa, and Cern just found the God particle! – and manages to build a team. Far worse, misunderstandings threaten to make the IMF team implode, even as deadly hostile agents close in on them. However, it all gets sorted out in the time it takes for them to get their hands on the launch codes that will detonate a nuclear device, which is also the time it takes for Ethan to figure out Paula is hot.
Enter India and telecommunication's moneybags Brij Nath (Anil Kapoor), whose toys include defunct Russian military satellites (way to rub in 2G, Hollywood) and fantasies include seducing white women in red. He ably outdoes his feat of pronouncing “millionaire” in seven different ways by churning out several gems here.
Even so, that’s the least stimulating aspect of Ghost Protocol. In his live action debut, Brad Bird – who directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille — makes humans do what he has so far had animators do. He shows us the minute within the cavernous, and makes the impossible seem plausible. The stunt sequences, whether they involve wearing something of a chastity belt and jumping into a ventilating shaft with a vicious contraption at the bottom, or scaling the tallest building in the world, or a fight-unto-death in a hi-tech car park, are astounding, and beg a huge IMAX screen.
Yes, Bird has eschewed 3D for IMAX, so you don’t have to wonder which sweaty nose your glasses last rested on. And the results are spectacular. However big a snob you are, you will have vertigo, and you will bite your nails and lean forward in your chair during the Burj Khalifa sequence. It leaves you wondering what Bird could do with a Bond movie. It also leaves you wondering whether Cruise was wacko enough to do that without CGI. Well, it’s probably all right for your cranial capacity to be inversely proportional to your facial bone structure.
Simon Pegg’s expressions are particularly delightful. Bird makes you grin by subverting the cheesy mask trick. And the stage is set for a fifth Cruisey-fix to ward off evil.
