Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Rating: 7/10 (10 June 2012)

From director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille), most people probably assumed that the third film was the last we would see of the leading actor playing the famous spy who gets himself into high risk situations, since he was fired from Paramount, but no, here was a fourth film. Basically IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agent Trevor Hanaway (Josh Holloway) has been killed, and it is up to Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his crack team of agents, Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton), to pick up where the killed agent left off. The mission they are given is to break into the Moscow Kremlin archives and find information to identify the villain and Russian terrorist calling himself "Cobalt" who plans to detonate a nuclear bomb somewhere, but the mission fails when something goes wrong and the Kremlin is blown up. The Russians are blaming the Americans for an attempted attack, and this also forces the IMF to be shut down, but the President puts them on "ghost protocol", basically to continue with whatever missions in secret until pace is made, and the team are joined by intelligence analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner). Ethan and the team identify Swedish-born Russian nuclear strategist Kurt Hendricks (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Michael Nyqvist) as the true identity of Cobalt, but he is not able to detonate any nuclear device without the codes which are with Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux), so they go to Dubai to stop him. It is there that Hendricks's right hand man Marius Wistrom (Samuli Edelmann) is due to exchange the codes for some highly valuable diamonds, this will be inside the Burj Khalifa, a very high glass building, but first Ethan has to climb the building and get to the meeting point without notice. After managing to get to the level of the building Ethan and Brandt do not have time for disguises, so they go as themselves, and at the same time the real exchange is compromised to avoid real codes being passed to the real people. The mission does not go according to plan as the real codes are taken by Hendricks, who was disguised as Wistrom, and Moreau starts fighting Jane who kicks her out of the window to fall to her death, and while they try to work out the next move there is discussion as to why everything has really happened the way it has. With the help of Bogdan (Miraj Grbic) Ethan and the gang find out that the villain is in Mumbai, and he plans to use a satellite belonging to Brij Nath (Anil Kapoor) to launch his attack with the missile capabilities. Jane gets the deactivation code to stop the device becoming active and to stop it, but Hendricks uses a virus to stop them from using it, so while Jane and Benji try to reactivate the broadcasting to stop the satellite Ethan goes after the villain. Hendricks makes sure that the missile is launched just before he falls to his death, but he is still alive long enough to see his plan fail as the launch is aborted and the city is aimed for is destroyed, and this also proves that the Americans had nothing to do with the Kremlin incident. In the end, after a quick get together with old friend Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames in a brief cameo), Ethan, Benji and Jane are glad that the IMF has been reinstated and look forward to another impossible mission, but Brandt walks away, but he changes his mind when Ethan reveals his wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) did not die, her death was staged, and we even see her at the end just before Ethan walks away. Also starring Vladimir Mashkov as Anatoly Sidorov, Ivan Shvedoff as Leonid Lisenker, Pavel Kríz as Marek Stefanski, Ilia Volok as The Fog and Tom Wilkinson as IMF Secretary. Cruise still gives the aggressive and determined performance we have seen the other three times, as well as doing even more of his own dangerous stunts, Renner is a great new moody addition to the team, and Pegg is great both being clever and giving comic relief one liners, the film is filled with some of the finest eye-catching material, with moments like the climbing of the high glass building, to the still technological gadgetry to carry out the highly risky tasks, with smooth special effects to help make them exciting, this is definitely a return to basics, a terrific action spy thriller. Very good!