Why are critics, the bulk of our top-tier movie scribes, giving such an enthusiastic pass to “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”? I normally wouldn’t care, but I just spent more than two hours (and $13) watching this convulsion of crushing tedium, much of that time engineering an early exit based on the next redundant action sequence.
I’m a mild fan of the series — I recall loving the second chapter, directed by John Woo (I was alone with that opinion, too) — so this isn’t an I-don’t-get-it, wrinkly-nosed huff at a cynical popcorn action blockbuster. This is a genuine say-what? to critical quotes like this from Roger Ebert, who granted the movie 3.5 stars: The movie “is a terrific thriller with action sequences that function as a kind of action poetry.” That’s the least of it. Other critics have authored small rhapsodies that swoon and twinkle. The movie earned a spot in the 90 percentile at Rotten Tomatoes.
The writers are wise enough to avoid “masterpiece” terrain, knowing what they’re dealing with — a whiplash-kinetic, mega-budget Tom Cruise vanity vehicle directed by Pixar whiz Brad Bird. That said, that’s pretty strong pedigree for an action picture. Cruise doesn’t fool around with work he’s produced, and Bird has shown swoops of genius with Pixar flicks like “The Incredibles” (this is his first live-action film).
I’m one of the few people who actually likes Cruise’s on-screen persona, no matter what it is. He’s a classic silver screen specimen, a humanoid formulated to be a movie star and all that that definition entails (including a spectacularly sui generis personal life). I even liked him in “Vanilla Sky.”
So it’s not a Cruise bias that had me bored, yawningly so, during “MIGP.” The whole enterprise felt routine, been there, done that. I won’t (can’t really) limn the convoluted plot, but the action set pieces, the reason we’re there, rarely scraped novel, save for the now-well-known bit with Cruise scaling the tallest building in the world, in Dubai. Even that fell flat. You knew he wasn’t going to fall, and anyway didn’t he scale some monstrous skyscraper in the last installment? Cruise is joined by Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg to make a crack spy team. The physical chemistry is fine, but the writing — all those wisecracks and piquant badinage — could have used a serious polish.
There’s abundant tension in the movie — your breath will cease when, say, Cruise plummets a car head-first down several stories (he lives, unscratched, indeed perfect, in this most implausible of actioneers) — but it only works on a watery visceral level. I never cared about the characters, and besides I knew our heroes at worst would take a flesh wound from a bullet. I didn’t demand much from this “Mission: Impossible.” I just hoped it would have delivered something the critics promised: a teeny thing called fun.
You really did not have fun? To each his own but I honestly disagree completely. It wasn’t perfect but I’d you truly did not have fun then you must have went to the theater in a bad mood looking for something to hate on.