The latest “Mission: Impossible” film, an enormous piece of product said to have consumed some $140-million on its way to an IMAX pleasure dome near you, has one idea, and you already know it. The idea is: Run for your life!
In “Ghost Protocol,” the fourth installment of this 15-year-old franchise, Tom Cruise–short of hits in the five years since the last film in the series–returns as Ethan Hunt, star agent of the Impossible Mission Force, that U.S. government espionage squad dedicated to squashing colorful malefactors in picturesque locations around the world.
This time out, Hunt has a new team: brainy-hot Agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton, smart choice); displaced intel analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner, over-qualified for this sort of exercise); and, also back again, tech wiz and comic-relief specialist Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). Their target: nuclear terrorist Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist, of the Swedish “Dragon Tattoo” movies), whose rather Bondian ambition is to destroy the world and then rebuild it into a new, improved, presumably more Hendricks-centric society.
The story begins inauspiciously. Hunt is confined in a Moscow prison, for reasons we don’t learn till much later. Carter and Dunn bust him out, and they all set off in search of the nuclear launch codes that are a key component of Hendricks’ scheme.
Read the full review at Reason.com