Entertaining enough addition to the franchise.

Rating: 6/10 (14 January 2012)

The fourth M.I.. movie sees Cruise locking himself in a closet and the rest of the cast shouting at him to come out. Hats off to South Park. Whilst 'Ghost Protocol' has a well endowed budget , but it is let down by a number of factors. Plotwise, it revolves around the tired cliché of I.M.F. being framed and the agents having to work 'rogue' to save the world and their reputation. How many films have come out of Hollywood involving agents/agencies being betrayed or framed? Its been done to death and will continue to be rehashed for as long as movies are made. In fact, Hunt's team was double crossed and targeted by the authorities in the first big screen outing of M.I. Dialogue is mundane, only existing to hang the action from. You can guess lines before the characters say them. The lead villain is too weak a character and his motive for trying to trigger a nuclear holocaust is decidedly silly. Quite a come down from having Philip Seymour-Hoffman as the adversary in M.I.3. Simon Pegg's character Benji goes from being incongruous to downright irritating and I would have enjoyed the movie a lot more without him. Samuli Edelmann is a weak link, her acting is pretty dire and she only seems to have two facial expressions. Ving Rhames' Luther manages to be the coolest person in the film in spite of only appearing for less than five minutes. The action is handled well, as you'd expect. My favourite part was the final showdown in the automated car park, one of the best action sequences I've seen for a long time. But action needs to be backed up by the other elements of a movie or else the overall product will falter. This film is also showing on I-Max but I choked at paying the £4.30 supplement (or 'Uplift' as Cineworld call it).