Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) Director: Brad Bird
“The Secretary is dead. The President has invoked Ghost Protocol. We’re shut down. No satellite, safe house, support, or extraction. The four of us and the contents of this car are all that remains of the IMF.”
Typically, Hollywood sequels rapidly decline in quality with each new iteration, but the Mission Impossible franchise has somehow managed to buck this trend. Ghost Protocol, the fourth Mission Impossible film, is an all-around fantastic action flick. It is unpretentious, engaging, and above all fun (a sorely lacking experience in much of our action blockbusters these days). Here, both the style and design are surprisingly compelling. In this wild thriller, the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) has been disbanded and “ghost protocol” has been enacted as a terrorist has gotten his hands on dangerous nuclear codes.
The opening scene shows a dramatic theft sequence in which an Impossible Missions Force (IMF) agent played by Josh Holloway (of Lost repute) steals a file containing nuclear launch codes in a train station in Budapest, but just as he is set to escape, he is assassinated in an alley by Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux). Next, we catch-up with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in a daring sequence wherein he is broken out of a Russian prison by the IMF and whisked off on a quest to recover the lost nuclear codes.
However, the IMF has apparently lost its credibility in America as the U.S. President has invoked “Ghost Protocol.” Ethan goes rogue yet again with his fellow off-grid agents (played by Jeremy Renner as William Brandt, Simon Pegg as Benji, and Paula Patton as Jane Carter) and we see him battling his way through three key regions in the film –Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai– with each locale involving a unique heist conundrum. In Russia, Ethan dons a military uniform and invades a government building using a fake digital projection screen, in Dubai –the most memorable scene of the movie– Ethan scales the world’s tallest building to successfully set-up a sting operation for the nuclear codes (Tom Cruise was actually suspended by ropes along the side of the building). The whole drama is well-constructed, the tension is brutal, only for it to be followed by a disorienting sandstorm chase scene through the murky streets of Dubai. Scenes like these have cemented Tom Cruise as the great action figure actor of our era, despite his all-too often strange public persona. He has built a newfound reputation of himself as slightly insane, perhaps just crazy enough to perform his own stunts –hanging out of airplanes, leaping across rooftops, and dangling off tall buildings.
Throughout the film, the foursome are being hunted by Russian agents after being blamed for the Kremlin bombing. In Mumbai, the final locale, they stage an undercover operation in which Jane seduces Nath in order to retrieve the nuclear satellite codes, while Brandt leaps down a wind tunnel using a suit made of magnets, and there is very nearly a nuclear submarine strike on San Francisco. But this James Bondian larger-than-life scenario is buttressed by the fact that IMF’s technology keeps breaking down –from defective wall magnets, to a glitching 3-D projection screen, and finally the laser itself. It gives us the sense that this is not an all-powerful spy ring. It is yet another touch which makes this franchise gripping, though I generally agree with the critical consensus that the villain in this film is mostly forgettable (Michael Nyqvist as Kurt Hendricks or “Cobalt”) but it is still a terrific action film which surprisingly begs for further rewatching.
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- Director: Brad Bird
- Written by: Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec
- Produced by: Tom Cruise, J. J. Abrams, and Bryan Burk
- Starring:
- Tom Cruise…..Ethan Hunt
- Jeremy Renner…..William Brandt, the IMF Secretary’s aide and an intelligence analyst.
- Simon Pegg…..Benji Dunn, a new IMF field agent and former IMF technician.
- Paula Patton…..Jane Carter, an IMF agent and Hanaway’s handler who works with Ethan.
- Michael Nyqvist…..Kurt Hendricks, a Swedish-born Russian nuclear strategist codenamed “Cobalt.”
- Vladimir Mashkov…..Anatoly Sidorov, a Russian SVR Agent who is after Ethan.
- Léa Seydoux as Sabine Moreau…..an assassin who worked for Hendricks at Dubai.
- Josh Holloway…..Trevor Hanaway: An IMF agent murdered by Moreau at the beginning of the film.
- Cinematography by: Robert Elswit
- Edited by: Paul Hirsch
- Music by: Michael Giacchino
- Production Companies: Paramount Pictures, Skydance Productions, TC Productions, and Bad Robot Productions
- Distribution Company: Paramount Pictures