Review of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) by Dillinger P — 08 Apr 2014

In this 4th installment of Cruise and Co impossible missions, the cracks are begining to show, not that it makes it a bad film, its more a case of how much longer can we stay with this IMF team with similar missions.

Its not secret by now that Cruise loves climbing up buildings, blowing things up and generally doing crazy things for the enjoyment of the fans of this franchise but if the last outing was formulaic this one just over steps the mark.

Hunt has been imprisoned in russia for reasons we are unaware of, our team played by Pegg and Patton bust him out of jail and it becomes apparent that one of their operatives, Holloway, was assasinated recently during a botched operation.

Soon Hunt and his team find themselves in the Kremlin where everything goes horribly wrong again and all the IMF team are disenvowed and shut down, leaving Tom wilkinson to make a brief appearance and join up Jeremy Renner with Hunt in order to stop some mass murdering Russian nut job from starting a nuclear war.

Hardly original material and hardly suprising this far into the series either, which is a shame as Abhrams left us in good stead last outing, not that he isnt part of the production side of this but he leaves Brad Bird in charge.

Yet again not a bad choice, his directorial skills are of a strong calibre. It's just this time everythings tongue and cheek, there is so much comedy as disposable characters that all the emotional connection we built up in the previous outing has vanished.

Our bad guy is forgettable, 1 dimensional and stereotypical garbage and Patton doesnt impress either. Pegg gives us comic relief every so often and Renner does a decent enough job while trying a bit hard to be cool and quirky.

Cruise here again continues to go to monumental efforts to get the material that is required but hes aging and id rather they took on that approach more than just continue to throw out the same pattern of action events.

Which by the way are yet again fantastic, the climb up the tall building.... bhuj Kalifa will give die hard adrenaline junkies vertigo and a very well executed finale fight between cruise and Mashkov is balletic and painful to watch.

It's just stale in compareson to what came before it. This series is in serious need of an upheaval, its time to get gritty again, its time to stuff your cast with outstanding and memorable characters and its time to move away from tall buildings because its getting old.

A reasonable watch, fun and highly entertaining in places, just dont expect anything gripping or new here.