Movie #4.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol has an impossible mission to follow up on. I just saw Phillip Seymore Hoffman give the performance of a lifetime and now they’re going to have to one up that. And they did.

Ghost Protocol was the fourth Mission Impossible movie, putting us up to 2015 in the release timeline. Directed by Brad Bird, who previously directed uh…The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. Interesting list of films to start out on. This is the first and last Mission Impossible film that Brad worked on. He’s more of an animated kids film kind of guy. The film writing debut of Josh Appelbaum who went on to write the Michael Bay TMNT movie as well as Out of the Shadows, and Andre Nemac who also wrote those same things.

This film is great. The fourth film brings back Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) once again to kill the bad guys. He’s joined by who else but Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn as well as newcomer Jane Carter (Paula Patton). They are also joined by Jeremy Renner playing William Brandt. Ethan is in a bit of a pickle; the Kremlin has been bombed and due to a bit of spywork the Russian government thinks that the IMF is responsible for it. To avoid all out war and save face, the President initiates Ghost Protocol. Oh hey, the title of the film. The IMF is disavowed and all agents are considered grounded for the foreseeable future.

All except Ethan and his crew.

What’s better than one bad guy? Two bad guys. Well, one bad guy and one misguided guy. Ethan is on the hunt for someone named Cobalt who is apparently working with the bad guys to obtain nuclear launch codes. What purpose? Something to read on the crapper, probably. He might also be looking to start a nuclear war, you know how those Russian terrorists are. Ethan is working against insurmountable odds; the bad guys, the American government, and the Russian government.

Because the Russians are pissed and they do genuinely think the IMF was behind the bombing. So they send out Anatoly Sidorov (Vladimir Mashkov) to track down Ethan and bring him into custody. Sidorov is a great character. He reminds me of Kittridge from the first movie. He’s an antagonist in the sense that he’s trying to bring down Ethan, but he’s not a bad guy in the sense that he’s doing his job in what he thinks is the defense of his country. All Sidorov wants is to bring the person who caused the bombing to justice, and right now that person appears to be Ethan’s crew.

There’s no masks in this movie, probably because they’ve done that concept to death and covered pretty much every way you could make it exciting. But this movie does not lack cool gadgets at all, including Ethan’s gecko hands, a big projection screen, sound thrower, and Jane Carter’s guns, by which I mean her rack. Damn. And of course we couldn’t finish this up without talking about the soundtrack, magnificent, as well as the fight sequences. Also magnificent.

We do get another scene similar to the first in which Ethan and Benji must work in complete silence. You could hear your own heart beat during this scene and both of them pull off the performance magnificently.

Next up on the docket is Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.