Cruise is back in control

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2011)

It was 1996 when Tom Cruise first took Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force from the small screen to the big screen and 15 years later this is his fourth outing, but he still looks good at 49. For this operation, he is accompanied by Jeremy Renner ("The Hurt Locker") as Brandt, Paula Patton as (a fair from plain) Jane, and British actor Simon Pegg as IT specialist Benji. Locations jump from Budapest to Moscow (although the Kremlin scenes were actually shot in Prague Castle) to Dubai and finally Mumbai, so neatly maximising the global appeal of the movie.
The villainy is on an epic scale. I thought that "Sherlock Holmes 2" - which I saw shortly before - posed a big enough danger: a first world war. But "Ghost Protocol" tops that by threatening the last world war. The evil Hendricks - played by Michael Nyqvist (the three Swedish Millennium films) - wants to provoke a nuclear conflagration that will wipe out all of humankind and give evolution a chance to start all over again which would indeed be homicide of a special order and render the inevitable "M:I 5" literally impossible.
The pacing of "Ghost Protocol" is furious and the whole thing is a real adrenalin rush. The scaling of the Burj Klaifa skyscraper is the highlight (sorry for the pun) and I saw the movie - before its general release - in IMAX on the biggest screen in Britain (London.s BFI) which made this scene truly awesome. More than the previous three episodes, there is some humour, but the best lines go not to Cruise but to Pegg who delivers them in characteristically wry fashion. As with all the other films in the franchise, what is missing is an intelligible plot and an intelligent script and, as with the last one, the ending is weak. But, heh, Cruise is back in control.