Fun, flawed but the best of the four.

Rating: 6/10 (16 June 2012)

This should have happened yesterday but the cinema failed to update its website despite the screen being closed for two days! Black marks to Cineworld, Hengrove Park.
We shared the cinema with four other people, which might concern some but delighted me. Give me an empty cinema over excited morons with phones and popcorn any day of the week. I don't need 'atmosphere' to experience a film; I save that for the football & tennis.
The short version is: Fun, flawed and the best of the four.
It's certainly a 'sit back and go with the ride' kind of film and doesn't stand up to a great deal of scrutiny. It's good (in a dark kind of way) to watch the Kremlin go boom instead of yet another rehashed White House wipe out and the scenes on the Burj Khalifa are certainly entertaining as long as you don't look too closely at the sandstorm and the background artistes failing to react to it. I enjoyed the ingenuity with which they did the deed inside the Kremlin (I'm trying not to give too much away here) and, as you'd expect with a Mission: Impossible flick, there are plenty of stunts, lots of action and sufficient noise to drown out most of the cheesy dialogue. Most, not all.
Unless you have bucket, it may be advisable to leave five minutes before the credits to avoid the wave of nausea caused by the schmaltzy metaphorical group hug celebrating the true friendship that carried the IMF team through the dark times. On second thoughts, stay, vomit and send it to Mr. Cruise in protest.
There are low points within the excitement, not least of all Paula Patton's periodic impression of a plank of wood. You won't be seeing her at the Oscars any time soon, methinks. The greatest annoyance for me is Simon Pegg. It's not that he's bad; he's not. He plays Simon Pegg better than anyone else I know. It's what he's required to be, as Benji, that raises the blood pressure.
Why, in an action film, does Hollywood think we are too shallow to cope for two hours without a half-assed smile or a childish comment? Does anyone look back at the Roger Moore Bond years with admiration for his unique brand of spy-humour? Pegg's turn in this is almost as painfully, embarrassingly humourless as (the usually fine) Alan Cumming's Boris in Goldeneye. We do not need another computer nerd/inept agent making stupid, childish, groan-inducing comments polluting our films. He isn't funny, he isn't clever and he's completely out of place. Don't do it again, Tom! But, yes, it's fun. Just watch it selectively.
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