Back to the future

Rating: 7/10 (11 October 2012)

I am such a fan of the original 60's TV series and am aware that many like-minded die- hards are down on Tom Cruise's take on it, promoting his star-power fit to burst where the original was all about the team and of course inserting ever-more hair-raising and unbelievable stunts which never featured previously. I see and get both those arguments and can't imagine for a second Cruise's at times almost superhuman Ethan Hunt fitting in alongside Peter Graves, Martin Landau et al from before, but while I still prefer the relative ingenuity and complexity of the TV version, I did at least feel that this newest instalment drew more on the original inspiration than others in the series, which I think benefited the entertainment here.
Yes, it's still all about Ethan, motivated by the apparent murder of his wife and his incarceration in a foreign prison, but touches like him getting his instructions the old- fashioned way, by self-destructing taped messages, re-using Lalo Schifrin's relatively unadorned theme music and the familiar and warming catch- phrases of old as well as his break-out from the prison and the team's first task at the Kremlin, hint back at the gravitas of the TV show although with the two subsequent exotic relocations to Dubai and India we're back in wonderland with out-of-this-world stunts atop the world's highest building and an extended fight between Hunt and megamind Hendrycks in an an automated car-park. While mind-boggling and white-knuckle inducing, these set-pieces find our hero doing the literally impossible, the usual one-handed grab to save himself falling off the high-building, taking an impossibly long breath to escape drowning and lastly having his body thrown about like a rag-doll in the final sequence as he finally saves the day.
There's no denying Cruise's charisma and his physical conditioning in the part. I wasn't particularly taken with the quality of his back-up team, but that could be down to the writers bigging-up the star role, plus I still find Simon Pegg's "Barney" role irritating and misplaced. I also never really felt that the villain had enough menace or stature to really challenge Hunt, especially during the climactic fight, but on the whole, I was almost won over by this latest IMF outing and yes, would welcome a succeeding instalment, the likelihood of which was strongly implied at the conclusion.