Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
The problem with giving a star rating to a movie is figuring out what criteria the stars are supposed to reflect. That is to say, is a five-star rating an indication of a film that will forever alter the fabric of cinematic history, change modern filmmaking aesthetics, and speak to your soul, like a celluloid angel from on high? Or do five stars indicate the film’s mastery of its field (a top-notch horror flick, a great romance-tragedy, a solid spy-thriller-caper)? Or, and especially in a recession, do stars just tell the viewer where to find the best bang for his or her buck? As most ratings don’t come with an explanation of what they mean, you have to take on faith that they represent all three of these things.
In that spirit, although we don’t give out star ratings for second-run films, we highly recommend M:I – Ghost Protocol. As the fourth instalment in the franchise that has taken rubber masks and convoluted plot lines to the extreme, M:I gives you what you want, when you want it, and all while Tom Cruise pulls a Benjamin Button by not looking a day older than he did in Interview with a Vampire.
In M:I4, our IMF hero, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), finds himself going rogue when his team is accused of—wait for it—bombing the Kremlin. Yes, the Cold War never ended. Hunt and his team must gallop about the world, finding clues and using high-tech toys to prove their own (and America’s) innocence, and to stop a nuclear attack on San Francisco.
But let’s move through this methodically. In terms of the tripartite starring structure outlined above, M:I4 might struggle in the first category. That being said, director Brad Bird (who gave the world the gift known as Ratatouille) does inject a healthy dose of comedy into the film, and if laughter is the sparkle of the soul, then, technically, M:I4 might just speak to us on that level. As for point two, the film delivers a tautly wound thriller, complete with nail-biting near mishaps, double agents, and, of course, rubber masks. And, as alluded to above, it is entirely unconcerned with glasnost, perestroika, Gorbachev, and late-20th-century history in general. Hunt and the gang infiltrate the Kremlin to a soundtrack with a hyperbolic tone perfectly suited to the height of the Cold War. This leads into the last point, as the film (shot in IMAX) exploits all the visual splendour of its locations (Budapest, Moscow, Dubai, Mumbai). And the price of a movie ticket, while on the rise, is nothing compared to airline fare.