Review 2: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Look, I liked Avatar. A lot. I think that film was an unprecedented achievement on a broad variety of levels, only one of which was that it was the first film in ages (probably ever, up to that point) to make 3-D seem like a viable part of the moviegoing experience. But I use the word seem. Beyond its 3-D, Avatar was a lot of other things, too: a Star Warsian monomyth, a quantum leap in visual effects technology, a major feat of worldbuilding, a thrilling and unexpected sweep of pop-cultural inclusion, and a boys-and-metal action-adventure movie from the guy who basically invented the genre. Point being, as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still way, way out on whether the seismic success of Avatar was due to its 3-D, or simply due to the fact that it was a thunderbolt reminder of how big, and how good, and how fulfilling going back to the cinema could be.

Which is a long way of getting around to saying that the latest Mission Impossible movie feels like a rejoinder to the prevailing assumptions that have formed in the post-Avatar world. This movie, gloriously released in IMAX five days before its parallel non-IMAX release, and carrying those six delirious minutes of The Dark Knight Rises (also shot in IMAX), is a bracing reminder of how completely immersive – that’s the word every single filmmaker who’s been fooled into using 3-D is coached to use when describing the appeal of stereoscopy – how completely immersive regular, high-quality, “2-D” filmmaking can be when it’s done right. Because, of course, it was never “2-D.” Traditional film is as three-dimensional as anything involving a pair of stupid sunglasses – more so, actually. And when it’s in IMAX, and it’s brought to the screen with the inestimable talent of Mssrs. Bird or Nolan, it’s more so more so more so.

So, as in The Dark Knight three years ago, and as will again be the case next summer with TDKR, large sections of Mission Impossible 4 (how – the fuck – have we earned four Mission Impossible movies in fifteen years?) have been filmed in full-frame IMAX. These scenes are jaw-droppers of the highest order. Brad Bird, shooting his first live-action motion picture, proves how transient the dividing line between animation and live-action can be; MI4:GP is as formidable a piece of filmcraft as one can hope for in this genre. It is also, I must say, the first Mission Impossible movie that proves wrong my longstanding belief that a great Mission Impossible movie simply can’t be done. It turns out it can; they just weren’t doing it, up till now.

Mission Impossible movies aren’t my favourite thing. The best I’ve been able to say for them so far is that they do the best they can with what might be a dead-duck concept for a film franchise: it seemed to be impossible to graft a compelling, star-driven spy thriller onto the heist-driven mechanics of the TV show, which was, above all, a team affair. The best we could hope for, in the big-screen Mission movies, was a kind of half-assed Bond/Bourne, driven by the berserk onscreen egotism of Mr. Ugly himself, Tom Cruise.

It seems to be “more of the same” for much of the first act of MI4, as Ethan Hunt and his team of impossible-missioners get sucked into the middle of a Kremlin bombing and have to spy their way out. I just don’t care about any of this shit. I don’t care why Sawyer was in Budapest, and which breathtakingly beautiful female agent he was in love with vs. which one is going to shoot him in an alley. I don’t care why Ethan Hunt was in prison, and I don’t care why he got busted out of prison. It’s all as trite and slick as you’d expect from Big Hollywood – a break-in sequence using a large, movable screen which creates an illusion of an empty corridor, to fool a security guard, is quite a lot of fun – but equally boring, in the “yet another action thriller” sort of way.

I do like the addition of Jeremy Renner, as he seems to be the key by which a very J.J. Abrams-ish interest in team dynamics – in critical decisions being made collaboratively by people with differing points of view – has been shipped into the Mission franchise. And I do like the fact that for the first time that I can recall (and honestly, I can never recall the Mission movies very well after they’re over), MI4 actually maps to the series’ basic principle: a team of people, performing heist-like missions, as a team.

But then comes the turn, and – actually, it happened in one of those by-now-clichéd shots taken inside a car as it turns itself over, only this time, the car flips over and then falls off a bridge – it occurred to me right at that moment that I was, y’know, watching a movie. A real movie. A Movie-Movie. A movie with a surprising quantity of self-deprecating grace to its to-and-fro missioneering. (Watch Tom Cruise zip-line his way out of a Russian hospital, bounce off a Range Rover, hit the ground hard, and then come up with a look of genuine surprise on his face that his stunt worked at all – a far cry from the superhuman heroics of the previous films, or of the other spy franchises.) And then, we punch out wide to a full-IMAX shot of Dubai, and see the somewhat overhyped Burj Khalifa tower beckoning to us as it has done in all the posters and trailers, and we begin the scene of Tom Cruise (let’s no longer call him Ethan Hunt) scaling the outside of the building, and…

 …and my palms were sweating.

I don’t think that’s ever happened to me in a movie before. I can’t remember it, if it has. In a vast, IMAX-sized, impossibly-well-staged set piece involving the tallest building in the world, Mission Impossible 4 made my palms sweat.

Fuck you, “3-D is so immersive.” You want to know what’s immersive? A really well-made film made on actual film, with crazy-ass humans doing impossibly crazy-ass stunts, with nary a CGI gopher in sight.

Mission Impossible: 4: Ghost: Protocol is filled to the gills with sloppy mistakes (like, for example, that title) (or how, structurally, it is actually impossible for the third act of the film to live up to the second, given that the Burj Khalifa heist is followed by a blind car chase in a sandstorm which must be seen to be believed) (and yes, the epilogue with the team congratulating themselves is excruciating). It hits its apex in the midpoint and has nowhere to go but down, is around ten minutes too long, and has a principal villain of nearly zero onscreen interest. But, in every conceivable sense of the idea, when you put down your $20 to see Mission Impossible 4 in IMAX, you will walk away saying, “that was worth every cent.” And maybe even a few more.

I think we’re going back to the movies.