Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol 2011
B+
I came in very late to the Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible series, starting with watching the sixth when it came to theaters. I really enjoyed that one and it became one of my top ranked movies of the year. The movie was an amazing collection of stunts, tension, fights, and intrigue. So I wanted to go back and revisit the other more recent episodes when it started getting good reviews, which was around this one, the fourth installment.
Like the sixth, all of those elements are there, but this one is a little more straightforward in that you know pretty much the entire time who is good and who is not, though you can never be sure. Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, is given some interesting backstory and turns out to speak Russian like a native (although maybe some of that backstory was just Mission Impossible 3?). Other than that there are some great scenes, starting pretty much immediately, and going all over the world. Simon Pegg gets a few funny scenes to lighten things up and the entire team makes contributions which keeps this from being a one man show. Towards the end, Hunt, who has been virtually bulletproof and able to do no wrong, suddenly can’t fight an old scientist, and there are some other things that I didn’t entirely accept, but if things aren’t going to go over the top at the end, when can they? I’m looking forward to watching the fifth one now.Written: 02 Sep 2019
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital