Look at poor Simon Pegg, way way back in the distance. He looks lonely
dir: Brad Bird
Sweet Zombie Jesus, if you’re going to make more of these monstrous Mission Impossible flicks, then continue getting Brad Bird to direct, because this one’s pretty amazing. From a pure action point of view, this is probably the best action flick I’ve seen in a long while, and I watch a lot of violent action flicks. Sure, a lot of them involve Chipmunks or are on the Nickelodeon channel, but my point still stands.
These lapdog American retreads of the James Bond espionage action genre have peaked right here, and it would probably be best if they just put it aside and backed away from the franchise. But they won’t, like we all know. Success breeds laziness, so Tom Cruise will probably be making these when he’s in his 80s and still puttering around looking like a 40-year-old thanks to foetal grindings and other secret Scientological super serums. I still find Cruise somewhat scary at the best and worst of times, but I can’t fault him for his work here. This flick exemplifies its own formula, excelling with the stuff that it’s known for, which is a bunch of incredibly orchestrated heists / break-ins, high-tech trickery, complicated impersonations, and saving the world at the very last second after travelling around it first.
The travelogue this time around requires visits to Russia, Dubai and finally Mumbai for their globe-trotting fix, before returning to that wretched den of scum and villainy, known as San Francisco. This isn’t some Eat Pray Love-type journey of self-discovery where they see the world, eat rich food for the first time in their lives and sleep with gorgeous Spanish men with bedroom eyes and washboard abs. They’re out to save the world from nuclear destruction, you sighing, overly romantic ninnies!
Brad Bird is probably best known for directing one of the best of a good bunch of films; they being Pixar films, and it being The Incredibles. This is his first non-animated flick, and he handles it very well. It’s pretty emotionally spare, it just flies along and doesn’t get bogged down by anything. It waits for no man or woman to catch up, and just keeps powering ahead whether you want it to or not. It’s not going to be mistaken for one of the Bourne flicks, but nor would you want it to be.
The team in question, being the team of agents? Operatives? Supergeniuses? I dunno, but they have to break someone out of a Russian prison. That’s our starting point. Although, when you start watching a flick that you know has Tom Cruise in it, and you don’t see him within the first five minutes, you start to get nervous. Where is he, when will he appear, is he okay, that sort of thing. And you also know that it would have to be him that they’re trying to rescue. Or else our minds will be blown.
There’s high tech guy Benji (Simon Pegg), and attractive agent Carter (Paula Patton), and that’s it. Sure, some guy died in Budapest, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with the rest of the story we’ll be watching unfold in Mother Russia.
Why would they do something so unkind to Ethan Hunt (Cruise)? I mean, that’s where the guy wants to be, in a Russian prison, having Russian things done to him. As some kind of punishment, I guess, they end up getting him out, and some other Russian guy as well. Two for the price of one.
It comes out that Hunt was on the trail of someone codenamed Cobalt, who wants to do some very bad things to the world. Very bad things. The worst.
This chap codenamed Cobalt wants to destroy the world, like this world, Our World. In a bit I just found sublimely hilariously disturbing, this Swedish chap who was really high up in Swedish Intelligence is giving some Hugo Chavez-esque speech to an assembly, perhaps the Russian Federal Assembly, or the Swedish Parliament, maybe a parent-teacher meeting, some type of important meeting at the very least. During this meeting the guy starts talking about how all life on the planet should be eradicated, and pretty much no-one bats an eyelid.
When Daffy Gaddafi (well, not now, obviously) or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rant about how a certain group of people, mostly living in Israel that they don’t like, need to be wiped off the face of the planet, well, people don’t like it, but they know he can’t do anything about it yet, and they can’t really strap him into a straitjacket like he truly deserves. What gets me about the scene we see is that even though it’s a Swede saying it, surely his own people who were nodding along as he was talking would have stopped at a certain point and thought “This guy is nuts! We need to put him somewhere where his madness cannot affect our perfect socialist thinking, though we shouldn’t do it in too harsh a manner, in accordance with our genial carefree Swedish ways.”
It seems Ronald Reagan was right. It’s the bloody Swedes behind everything. If it seems too unlikely that a lunatic Swede, adequately played by Michael Nyqvist, would want to trigger a nuclear wiping-off of the world’s slate, well, let me just tell you, they’re not all sunshine and snow up in that northern part of the world. Some of them are downright unpleasant. And it doesn’t get any more unpleasant than blowing up the Kremlin, and making it look like the IMF were responsible, in order to trigger an exchange of retaliatory nuclear strikes.
No, not the International Monetary Fund. The IMF is the organisation Ethan and his team work for, saving the world on a regular basis from the megalomaniacs who try to do bad stuff to the rest of us. You know, megalomaniacs like the actual IMF.
Christine Lagarde and Dominique Strauss-Kahn would make excellent villains in the next flick. I’m just saying.
So the big action set pieces, all involved in trying to stop the silly Swede Hendricks in his dastardly plan, involve infiltrating the Kremlin in order to find out who he is, which uses disguises and fancy digital camouflage tech which, of course, always stuffs up at the worst but funniest time, climbing up on the outside of the world’s tallest hotel, driving at high speed through a sandstorm in Dubai, and then a whole bunch of other stuff involving fans, magnets, the strangest vertical car park I’ve ever seen, and, I dunno, maybe a quick jog through an underpants factory. All of them, with possibly the exception of the bits where the high tech gadgets they use stuff up (which is hilarious in itself), are incredibly well-handled. It doesn’t matter if we don’t really know or care about these characters. What matters is that they are good at what they do, and we enjoy watching them do it.
The important thing is that they do the things we want them to do in order to keep the world safe. Hell, even if they were doing it to keep the world unsafe, as long as they look good doing it.
The set ups and the carry-throughs, like the tension of the sequence where they’re running two fake meetings at the same time, are tense as anything and a joy to behold, because, and I hesitate to use this word, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. For us, not the people dying. Brad Bird, or at least the editor he worked with, knew exactly how to put them all together for maximum tension. I could wax rhapsodically about the other sequences as well, but I’ll resist the impulse, because it takes some of the fun out of it. Suffice to say that whatever you think about Cruise, it’s great watching him cheat death in these stupendous ways.
The ‘new’ addition to the team, Brandt (Jeremy Renner, finally getting something decent to do since Hurt Locker), fits in nicely, though he’s pretty much doing the cheesy comic relief that neither Simon Pegg nor Cruise want to say. He’s given as light a backstory as possible, but even I was thinking during these scenes where they weren’t beating the shit out of people or trying to jump through glass windows or blow up the world that there was too much talking.
Get back to blowing shit up, I was thinking. The world needs less conversations about Croatia, and more explosions.
Action junkies couldn’t be disappointed by this, surely. This delivers on its promise and looks great doing so. It kills time (but not all life on the planet, spoiler alert) very agreeably, very agreeably indeed.
8 times the constant fucking up of their gadgetry was some kind of sly subtext, methinks, out of 10
--
“The President has initiated Ghost Protocol. The entire IMF has been disavowed.” - and there won’t be any dessert until we finish our vegetables.– Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
- 3297 reads