Should you choose to accept this? Oh yes

Rating: 9/10 (21 December 2011)

The Mission Impossible series is one of the very few series' I have ever seen in which each film is better than the last. So the latest is the best in the series yet, and it's up there with Fast Five as the one of the year's best action films. Any skeptics who thought Brad Bird couldn't do so good of a transition from animation to live-action have been proved utterly wrong. The direction of the actors is first rate and the star-studded cast reward Bird with super performances, Tom Cruise in particular, who is repeatedly confirming with each film that he's one of the best movie stars and still has the ability to inevitably draw large crowds. And that is for 25 years now.
On the other hand, the technical side of the film, as predicted, is incredible. Especially the Burj Khalifa sequence, which looks to have been a literal Mission Impossible to have created accurately, but the filmmakers did it. The sound is piercing, shots of the several countries in the film are mightily impressive, and the set pieces have been superbly engineered.
The bad bits? Bird has ditched heart (the romantic subplot from the last film) for adrenaline – although this has managed to be a satisfying and invisible change. It's hardly a spoiler but it would have been cliché if Paula Patton's Jane and Ethan Hunt fell in love. The major bad point has to be the villain, Hendricks, portrayed by the Millennium trilogy's Michael Nyqvist. It is likely that if there is another sequel and the talk about the series becomes loud again, Hendricks will be a forgotten villain. It is a virtually impossible mission to solely focus on Hendricks throughout the film because the story's transition from country to country sees more than one threat to the IMF team and the task for the audience is to divert their attention to each one, which results in subtracting interest in Hendricks. In comparison, Owen Davies (I remembered his name in this review, wonder if I remember who Hendricks is in the likely-to-happen MI5) is a much more memorable and menacing villain than Hendricks.
Thankfully, the IMF team win our attention and garner the most interest as we see Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa, Paula Patton sexily strutting around an Indian palace, Jeremy Renner tackle another complex character – Brandt, the IMF Secretary's Chief Analyst – and Simon Pegg, as in every film, provide the humour. From the teams Ethan Hunt has been prepared for in the past, this is the most exciting to watch. And this is the most exciting film to watch, especially in IMAX, even if only for the Burj Khalifa scene because it is a much more spectacular sequence on a very large screen. A recommended film to watch, thinking of any better entertainment in cinemas right now (or in the past 6 months) is a Mission: Impossible.