Inevitably it was going to come to nukes. This whole franchise is based off a Cold War-era TV series about spies, nuclear weapons had to factor in eventually. And it also just happens to fit the aesthetic interests of the new director brought on to helm Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol, Brad Bird -an avid fan of Cold War subjects and iconography, as exemplified in his two most popular movies The Iron Giant and The Incredibles.
The fourth Mission: Impossible film was his live-action movie debut, after back-to-back Pixar classics, and if you pay attention you can certainly find the clues to his animation background in several of his choices here. Although maybe the most beneficial, which feels to directly owe something to The Incredibles in particular, is the expansion of the cast around Tom Cruise as major players in the action. This is the first Mission: Impossible movie to genuinely be about a spy team, with Ethan Hunt at the centre, rather than simply a Tom Cruise vehicle with the cast around him fairly arbitrary. It speaks to shifting times, this was 2011 now. It needed to expand its’ scope of characters, and adapt its’ scope of action for a new decades’ Hollywood climate that doesn’t value genre the way it once did. Ghost Protocol, despite being a direct follow-up to Mission: Impossible III, with notable strains of continuity, is essentially a soft reboot of the series. And one that I think is very successful.
Abandoning completely any hints of the retirement ambitions of Ethan Hunt in the previous installment, the film opens with him being rescued from a Russian prison where he has been interred for an undisclosed span of time, his wife apparently deceased. At the same time, a set of dangerous nuclear codes have been stolen off of another IMF agent for a buyer called Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist). A mission to investigate him at the Kremlin turns awry when a bomb goes off, destroying much of the building, creating a diplomatic catastrophe, and resulting in the dissolution of the IMF. Hunt is armed with simply a small team: handler Jane Carter (Paula Patton), tech strategist Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg in a major upgrade of his character in M:I:III), and analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), to go after Cobalt and stop his provocation of a nuclear war.
Centralizing the crew and cutting them off from their resources is a great way to freshen up this series and increase the mission stakes. It also makes for a more organic way to establish this new dynamic. Over the course of the movie they form a strong unit and balance each other out in interesting ways. Carter is in trauma getting over the loss of an agent she was close to (possibly romantically involved), while Brandt has that degree of mystery hanging over him that Renner plays very well; and Benji might even be the secret sauce, Pegg providing the films’ sense of comic relief and relatability -while also turning on that genuine cool he developed on Hot Fuzz. Cruise of course maintains his daring charisma, but he seems humbled too -more than in any previous film, wearing the loss of his wife and the weight of the mission quite earnestly.
The machinations of the figures around them maybe aren’t so interesting -Nyqvist’s villain is the only element not a step-up from the last movie- but they provide for plot threads that serve both the story and the action requirements. Vladimir Mashkov’s Russian agent tailing Hunt for the Kremlin bombing is an interesting recurring element -even if he might just be a little superfluous; while characters like Ilia Volok’s friendly arms dealer and especially Léa Seydoux’s catalyst assassin are just a treat to watch (Seydoux gets an awesome fight scene with Patton midway through). All are juggled well by Bird, whose understanding of the importance of visual story beats doesn’t hamper his handling of the more direct tension, drama and humour that the movie engages in.
But of course he was hired for those visual storytelling skills, transferred from his animation background. And Bird takes to them with incredible confidence and aptitude, whether it’s the chaos of the exploding Kremlin, or Hunt pursuing Cobalt through a sandstorm (both of which require some classic Tom Cruise running). The big set-piece of the movie however is the Burj Khalifa, almost certainly chosen before a script was even written -because what better way to up the ante than to have Cruise scaling the tallest building in the world. When he is actually out there precariously on the side of the tower more than a hundred stories up it is genuinely thrilling -one of the first times this series has truly impressed me with an action sequence. There is value in the tangibility of it -the knowledge that Cruise (though supported) was actually out there climbing and falling and at one point leaping into an open window, it makes a difference. Really gives an authentic weight to the franchise title in a way it hadn’t before.
The climax isn’t quite as well structured, for as drastic as the stakes become, but it certainly carries its’ own series of cool sequences. That’s another thing that Bird seems well suited for, he lends a stylishness to several scenes that actually brings a little bit of glamour back into the spy genre. It probably could have done without Carter seducing an Indian media mogul (Anil Kapoor) though, which even the movie itself seems to realize is reductive. But the last scenes do work to fulfil character arcs, particularly concerning Hunt and Brandt, and ultimately find a way around the fridging of Hunt’s wife that still effectively excises her from the series. And the post-mission briefing even brings back Luther, absent for whatever reason from this adventure.
The movie ends with Hunt thanking his team and saying he couldn’t have done it without them; it provides him with a resolution for the lingering threads of the last movie and seemingly sets up the next one as well. This shift that Ghost Protocol brought about was necessary, with a strong enough story and creative focus to earn that stature that Mission: Impossible now enjoys as more than just an action-spy series based on an old TV show. Going on fifteen years, it in no way feels like a relic.
Next week we’ll see how its’ fortunes continue under the last new director this series would bring on, Christopher McQuarrie, in Mission: Impossible –Rogue Nation.
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