Ethan takes a hell of a beating in Ghost Protocol, allowing the movie to keep pace with both the gritty realism brought on by the Bourne franchise and Cruise's advancing age. Ghost Protocol is a long way from the ridiculous stunts of John Woo's entry, in years and in style. The entire Dubai sequence (practically a third of the film), is peppered with great examples of this lesson in action, with the IMF's fancy gadgets failing one by one.įor all he throws aside, however, Bird is also wise to keep the rough-and-tumble realism of Abrams' film. Long associated with Pixar (where he directed The Incredibles), Bird clearly embraces the technique disclosed on the Toy Story commentary: give your protagonist an easy solution, and then remove it from the equation and force the characters to scramble for something better. ![]() Bird pulls back, losing some of the personal stakes, but he gains tighter pacing and more action-oriented tension. Still, as logical as it sounds to humanize and dimensionalize Ethan Hunt, the Mission: Impossible franchise doesn't really need nor is designed to sustain the amount of sentiment Abrams brought to the table. Nothing like an explosive charge in the brain to generate tension. The strengths of the third film were pacing and stakes. A few hours later, the entire IMF is disavowed, the US and Russia are at each other's throats, and the three agents are stranded in the field with an analyst named Brandt (Jeremy Renner), armed only with one cache of equipment and a one-chance, race-against-time opportunity to stop Hendricks from inciting World War III. Hunt and his team go to gather intelligence, but Hendricks is a step ahead, bombing the Kremlin and pinning it on Ethan's team. Fellow agents Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg, returning from III) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton) show up and spring him in the hopes he can help them stop a man named Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), code named Cobalt, a former government expert on nuclear war who eventually concluded that peace can never be achieved without a little fallout. Watching Ghost Protocol again on Blu-Ray, so many of the nitpicks and complaints I had when I saw it in IMAX seem irrelevant this is easily the best of the series thanks to the efforts of Cruise and director Brad Bird to continually up the ante.Īfter a short prologue, we're reunited with IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise), lounging around in a Russian prison. ![]() When Ghost Protocol was opening in theaters, I was distracted by my love for Spielberg's Tintin, and still grumbling about the tepid reception of Mission: Impossible III (my then-favorite) thanks to Tom Cruise's nationally televised meltdown just before that film's release.
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