Topic: "Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol" Review by Landporpus [No Spoilers]
Once in a while a sequel to a successful film or film franchise comes along and completely ruins the enjoyment of that franchise to such a degree that you can never watch that films predecessors again without feeling a bit of that fun was lost. With that in mind, I'm am so happy to say that Mission Impossible 4 is NOT one of those sequels.
This is one of those films that had so much potential to up and fail, and yet all the concerns many people had for MI4 actually worked perfectly, and occasionally worked towards the films benefit. I'm gonna take a guess here and say that, I think the big red flag problems people saw going into MI4, had come from Indiana Jones 4 falling flat on it's face. Let's do a quick comparison…
You got 2 franchises that both hadn't been touched in a while.
2 good actors, but both look like they are past their action movie years.
2 fairly heavy, animation and CGI backgrounded directors (especially Bird) who could become overly reliant on Visual Effects.
And both had that possible trouble of too many people saying "well it's a _____ movie, so we got to put that _____ in there because that made those other films good.
Unfortunately our worst fears where indeed realized in Indy 4, but luckily the same can not be said for MI4. Tom doesn't come off too old for action. The CGI is kept to a minimum, and I never really felt like I was just watching a rehash of previous Mission Impossible films.
I think the best thing this movie has going for it, are it's action and suspense sequences. I know Brad Bird created the sequences himself, which is really grate since his types of peril situation's perfectly blend something simple with something epic and fantastic. A guy hanging by adhesive gloves 50 stories up a building is ironically way more suspenseful then a huge chase scene though the dense jungles of the Amazon where people are fencing with each other and swing with monkey's on vines though the tree tops.
While the action stuff is really the spotlight of any Mission Impossible film, I find it's the little character stuff that carries the rest of the film, and thankfully there is a lot of fun character interactions throughout MI4. I don't want to spoil anything if you haven't seen it, but there is some particularly good witty humor with Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner's characters.
I guess the only real deficiency this film has, comes from the antagonist. While Tom Cruise doesn't come across as to old, (for the most part) Michael Nyqvist does not look fit to be doing what he's doing. The amount of beating this guy takes and lives through is a bit far fetched for a guy who looks as old as he does.
Yes MI4 is not the perfect movie, but I would say it's at least a perfect movie, in that it does everything it suppose to do, which all we can really hope for in a time where movies like Battleship exist.
I highly recommend it!