Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
Directed by Brad Bird
Ethan Hunt and his team are racing against time to track down a dangerous terrorist named Hendricks, who has gained access to Russian nuclear launch codes and is planning a strike on the United States. An attempt to stop him ends in an explosion causing severe destruction to the Kremlin and the IMF to be implicated in the bombing, forcing the President to disavow them. No longer being aided by the government, Ethan and his team chase Hendricks around the globe, although they might still be too late to stop a disaster.
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What critics say influenced Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Accomplished with very little dialogue and unexpected humor under the circumstances, it's an escape from a Russian prison by Cruise's Ethan Hunt (first seen throwing a ball against a wall, in likely homage to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape) orchestrated electronically from the outside by the one other holdover from the last film's team, Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg).
For instance, the film opens with a scene from "The Sting," followed by ones from "Get Smart," "The Great Escape," "The Fugitive," the "Bourne" adventures, and a penultimate sequence from both "Goldfinger" and "Monsters, Inc."
How about roughly every Hitchcock film you can think of, starting with "The 39 Steps"?
Brad Bird offers commentary throughout, and talks about the importance of the jumps that Ethan doesn’t quite land, and how he looked to the very movie I cited in my review, Raiders of the Lost Ark, for inspiration on the vulnerable action hero.
And “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” falls perfectly in line with its predecessors: helmed by Brad Bird, whose combination of brisk action and humanizing comedy made Pixar’s “The Incredibles” such a winner, the fourth film is its own entity, a bemusing but visceral thriller that ups the series’ stakes while staying true to its core concepts.
This time around, the directorial reins have been handed over to Brad Bird, making his live-action feature debut after directing the acclaimed animated films "The Iron Giant," "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille," and while it might seem at first blush to be an odd idea to put a project of this size in the hands of someone who has never made a non-animated film before, he proves to be an incredibly inspired choice.
Continuing in the M:I movie series tradition of having a new director for each entry, animation maestro Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) takes the rein of his first live-action film and instantly establishes his credibility with a cracking pre-credit sequence that combines many of the elements fans have come to expect (international locales, mortal danger, high-tech hardware).
This time, Pixar veteran Brad Bird (“The Incredibles”) got the nod.
Although spy intrigue is an essential element to the winning M:I formula, the feature films have always tilted more toward the action spectacle, and snagging Oscar-winning animation director Brad Bird to fill the director's chair proves to be an inspired choice--and, upon thought, a bit of a no-brainer, given that his The Incredibles was one of the most exciting action pictures in recent memory, animated or otherwise.
And mostly, there's Bird, quietly orchestrating all of this with his typically energy and affection for old cinematic forms - as with The Incredibles , there's a pronounced '60s vibe going on beneath the CGI and rapid-fire cutting.
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I remember a story Clint Eastwood told me years ago, after he made " The Eiger Sanction " (1975).
Automated parking garage fight!), including a quote-unquote thrilling climax that was cribbed almost entirely from Spies Like Us, provide ample distraction.
As I've stated before, a protagonist (and the film in which he or she appears) is only as good as the antagonist, and a deeper characterization of the latter here clearly would have made the pic better (think of Hans Gruber in "Die Hard" as a perfect example).
During the best scenes, I remembered why I still love Raiders of the Lost Ark and Die Hard so much.
This opening is so thoroughly over-the-top absurd that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Val Kilmer’s character from the spy spoof “Top Secret!’’ turned up as the quickly dispatched chief of IMF (alas, it’s an unbilled Tom Wilkinson).
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The whole nuclear-apocalypse-now plot feels a tiny bit like a leftover from a Roger Moore-era Bond — there were one or two moments, particularly when the globe-trotting paused in India, that I worried I was watching “Octopussy” again.
Whether he’s playing Hamlet or his “Lethal Weapon’’ psychopath, he’s ready to die in a way that makes some psychological sense.