Mission: Impossible to watch

Rating: 3/10 (24 December 2011)

*** Spoilers ahead ***
From the awful opening scene with Josh Holloway from 'Lost' hamming it up, you're wondering if this is a joke scene. Maybe it's a "Turn off your cell phone" bit. No, it's not, you're just at the beginning of a two hour odyssey of extreme Dell server maintenance.
Having read the general hyperbole for this movie, it's stunning at how thin the plot is and how pointless each action sequence is. This is not Bourne or Bond. If you're looking for a tense build up to all-out global nuclear war, you're better off checking out Wargames (1983). If you're looking for scene after scene of running and looking for codes then get in line here.
If you missed a car tumbling over Ethan Hunt in M:I3, don't worry, you can see it right here in M:I4. If you missed any previous server room break-ins, don't worry, M:I4 brings you not one but two of them. If you love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory you'll love the fan and the tube scene, except Jeremy Renner doesn't know he has to burp! Oh those fizzy lifting drinks are trouble!
This by-the-numbers action flick gets tiresome very quickly as clichéd character back story is spoon fed to us at regular intervals with plenty of explanation. A lost unrequited love? Check. Guilt over an innocent's death. Check. Said lost love resulting in a ten second girl fight? Check. Futuristic super-car that turns up out of nowhere? Check. Character that is pivotal to the first scene and then turns up later for no reason to no avail? Check. The list just goes on and on. It's all mix and match character tropes, did the writers phone this in?
Simon Pegg's character has no back story other than pre-existing in the M:I universe and being English.
Even the nemesis of the entire operation has fairly little screen time or motivation other than being evil and mad. MAD I say! It might have worked for The Incredibles, but this isn't a cartoon. This lack of realism pervades the whole film, the police never show up, America lets a missile get within 500 ft of a West coast city without launching a full on retaliatory strike. Did they not watch Dr. Strangelove?
The classic Mission:Impossible mask reveal is a really weak one too. Secondary bad guy turns out to be oooooOOOoooo...... the other bad guy.
Spy movies need to have unseen before, secret spy gadgetry right? Well hold on to your socks because M:I4 brings you GPS navigation, chain mail and magnets, a USB memory stick and a reversible jacket, casual on one side and Russian formal on the other. OK, the magic gecko gloves were new but they're no exploding chewing gum.
Brad Bird and J.J Abrams must have a "Get out of jail free" card because if anyone else produced this movie it would have been savaged. Savaged in the same way as Transformers: Dark of the Moon, yet it will find the same audience and make lots of money.
On leaving, someone said, "Wow that was intense." Intensely boring you mean. In what's supposed to be a breath of fresh air in the action genre, this feels like a boat load of the same. Cruise fans should just watch War of the Worlds again or even the first Mission: Impossible
A word of warning, if you see the IMAX version with the 6-minute Batman preview, it only highlights the massive drop in creativity and originality that you're about to watch.