Great Action, A Little Hard to Follow

Rating: 7/10 (9 August 2015)

It doesn't top the opening for the third installment, but the opening sequence of this film when the IMF crew is trying to break Hunt out of prison is very-well executed and action-packed, which is no surprise coming from the very "fun" director, Brad Bird.
I don't know if I ever saw the trailer for this installment in the Mission: Impossible series, so I'm not sure if this moment was shown in the trailer, but when the Kremlin explodes in the background while Ethan is running in the foreground, it startled me a great deal on my first viewing. It was a very simple, yet shocking moment in an action movie, at least to me.
This sets the premise for the rest of the film: Hunt and his crew have to go rogue since IMF is implicated in the explosion of the Kremlin.
The Macguffin - the launch codes - is easy enough to follow, as a Macguffin should be, but in the scene where they are making the false transactions - one for the female assassin, one for the men who need the launch codes - I never clearly heard Hunt's reasoning for giving the two men the actual launch codes. Also, I didn't understand Jeremy Renner's special contact lens - from what I understood it was able to encrypt the launch codes into a different sequence, but for who? This confused me especially since I knew they were going to supply the actual launch codes to the men who wanted them.
The scene following is a phenomenal action sequence which is so tense since we, along with Ethan, cannot see what is going on in a sandstorm, and have to keep our eyes peeled to Ethan's tracking device to realize how he cuts the villain off and is about to cause a head-on collision. It still doesn't stop the villain, but it is smart to put us in the dark just like Ethan.
Another aspect of the film that was a little difficult to follow - and a little boring as well - was the explanation for what happened to Ethan's wife. With film, there is usually a "show, don't tell" principle to follow, but when Renner's character and Hunt talked about the events and what really happened to Hunt's wife, it could have used this principle instead of making us rely on every detail spoken to discern what they are talking about.
This film reminded me of the first in that it was more pretentious than it should have been, but the action was much more exciting than in some of the previous films.
3.0/4.0