Review: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Leaving aside if it’s even possible the fantastically bizarre real-life persona Tom Cruise has managed to cultivate for himself over the past decade – the manic couch jumping, the weird culty religion, the rumours of an arranged marriage – and focussing only on the movies like a good not-celebrity-obsessed citizen, it becomes clear after seeing his newest hyperhuge popcorn action flick Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol that… well, dude is a little weird.

The hinky feeling starts as text begins to fly in over the old-fashioned spy-movie assemblage of conceptual gun-barrel spaces and judo-chops that is the film’s opening credits. A Bad Robot Production… OK, that’s a familiar sign of J.J. Abramsian quality. A Tom Cruise Production.

Did Tom Cruise name his company “Tom Cruise”?

Did he go to a lawyer and request an incorporation and tell said lawyer that the name of the company is Tom Cruise? Is it less weird if it’s not a company and he just used his megawatt influence to not only be a producer but have a title saying "A Tom Cruise Production" (rather than the more pedestrian “Producer: Tom Cruise”) so it just seems like there’s a company out there, somewhere, with secretaries and a fax machine, called Tom Cruise: the Company? What the hell, Tom Cruise?

That weirdness continues through the guts of what's not a bad film, as Tom and company get completely wild all over the Burj Dubai in a truly fantastic, half-hour long set piece involving all the things that make the Mission Impossible franchise such good popcorn fare.



I won’t elaborate on the plot, as it doesn’t matter much (to us or the filmmakers, it seems, given the number of weird pointless and seemingly easily-avoided plot holes, loops, odd detours and omissions), but it’s got gadgets, a heist, a complicated con, a couple of fistfights and some shootouts, and it culminates in a car chase, all fantastic, solid stuff.

It’s kinetic and tense, exhilarating and fun and run through with that deep vein of Tom Cruise in 2011’s fundamental weirdness. You see him pause, framed just so with his cool guy hair and that grin, and it twigs: he’s 6 months shy of 50.  Why is he doing this? What is the point? 

What is the point of the film’s last ten minutes, a completely unnecessary coda involving Ethan Hunt’s Deep Emotional Feelings and Forgiveness and Love? 50 year old Tom Cruise (the actor, not the company) is clearly completely confused about what movie he’s in. We're watching a disposable action-candy movie about lasers and people working for the profoundly retardedly named Impossible Mission Force. Cruise, on the other hand, believes he is in a movie where we care about the personal lives of people that work for the Impossible Mission Force, where such people have feelings and motivations beyond "stop the bomb", lives with such poignancy that we are as an audience supposed to remember such personal character details from film to film over the space of years. It's hilarious, and to hang an emotional, heart-rending conclusion onto such a fundamentally stupid, essentially childish and fun movie speaks to the real weirdness of Tom Cruise, man and company, the weirdness of an ego gone absolutely supernova, and reigned in by other talents and Cruise’s own natural charm. The mistaking of this for that by a man with an incomprehensible personal power to shift hundreds of millions of dollars around. The mistaking of man for company, of 50 year old dude for 20-something action hunk, the mistaking of essentially disposable fun for serious, moving pathos. 

It’s a dilemma – Tom Cruise the company can get this thing made, can get the money to get the Imax camera to Dubai, can swing the deal with BMW to get the futuristic sexy car, etc., but Tom Cruise the guy is inevitably going to drill his own movie through with holes of movie-fan existentialist angst-making pointlessness, holes into which I kept tumbling. Why is he doing this? What his character is doing is interesting and compelling and action-movie cool, but why? What motivates a guy like that, at 50, to do what he’s doing? Why staple the horrible last 10 minutes on to the film? Is it because he’s crazy? If I was in his shoes, would I be crazy? Is that an Uzi? Did a guy just get run over? Where does he sleep? On, and on… Tom Cruise distracts from the excellence of Tom Cruise with the sheer ego weirdness of Tom Cruise. I can’t unpack it. It’s too… well, it's too weird. Fun though.