The problem stems partly from the fact that MI:GP is
somewhere near the middle of the scale, neither remarkably good nor bad. That
always makes it tough for me to psych myself up for a review. But the bigger
problem is that MI:GP only barely qualifies as a movie at all. It’s more like a
series of clever action shorts connected by quickly-spoken dialogue on
fast-moving vehicles en route to our next location.
Here’s my take on the evolution of the franchise:
Mission Impossible 1 – the one where Jon Voight betrays Tom
Cruise, forcing the MI team to break into CIA headquarters itself – was
competent but utterly forgettable. It was directed by a Brian de Palma so
desperate to earn one last studio check that he framed each shot with the
predictability of a “directing for dummies” manual. The movie was a commercial
success on the strength of efficient marketing. Which led us to…
Mission Impossible 2 – the one John Woo directed with his
usual operatic absurdity. This is the one where it turns out everyone’s wearing
extremely realistic masks, which they start yanking off in Act Three for a
series of dramatic reversals. I think Tom Cruise was actually wearing two masks
at one point. This was the worst movie of the year 2000.
Then along came Mission Impossible 3, and shockingly, it was
pretty good. This is the one where Phillip Seymour Hoffman – an actual actor! –
kidnaps Cruise’s wife and won’t give her back until Cruise steals and then
delivers a mysterious doomsday device known only by its codename, “rabbit
foot.” This is an actual bad guy plan! Hooray! I do not feel MI:3 got slighted
by failing to win the Best Picture Oscar, but it had narrative logic, good
pacing and flow, and even a couple relationships we could hang our emotional
hats on. The movie was directed by JJ Abrams and was part of his ascent to the
A-list, which he is currently defiling with films way worse than MI:3.
Now we’ve got Mission Impossible 4, directed by Brad Bird of
Pixar fame. I’m a bit of an iconoclast on Pixar. I like all of their movies but
love none of them. The Pixar writers room is a self-described “factory” where
scripts are hammered into shape by thirty or forty very good writers. And the
stories all feel that way. You have to be a team player to get along at Pixar,
and Brad Bird is the teamiest of all the team players.
But don’t go looking for artistic vision from him. And
especially don’t go looking in Mission Impossible 4.
Theoretically the movie is about “Ghost Protocol,” the
last-resort disavowal of the entire mission impossible task force by the U.S.
government itself in the event IMF does something very bad.
In this case, the entire Kremlin gets blown up while Tom
Cruise and company are within a couple hundred feet of the place. They get
blamed by the Russians and disavowed by the U.S. Just like that, IMF doesn’t
exist. Cruise and company – british comedian Simon Pegg, American beauty Paula
Patton and the next Jason Bourne, Jeremy Renner – must band together to clear
their names and restore the IMF to the world’s good graces.
How do they do this? Oh heck, I don’t know. There IS no real
story in Mission Impossible 4. I’ve just described the set-up, but everything
that follows should be described in terms of its accomplishments in the art of
stuntwork and pyrotechnics, not the development of story.
I’ll take a stab at the story anyway:
Someone’s got a satellite that controls some nuclear missiles,
which may have to be shot down with a laser, but the good guys have to get the
override codes for the laser, and they have to pay for the codes with stolen
diamonds, but there have to be some glass diamonds to fool the other people
trying to get the codes, but once the other people get the codes anyway, the
good guys have to chase them into a sandstorm, where they discover the bad guy
was wearing a mask all along…
As you can tell, I have no clear idea what happened in
Mission Impossible 4 or why. And I like action movies.
The reason I don’t hate this movie is that narrative clarity
isn’t the only virtue a movie can have. There’s also those stunts and
pyrotechnics. In MI:4, they’re excellent, especially the deservedly
talked-about “spiderman” sequence, where Cruise climbs the side of a Dubai
skyscraper wearing a pair of electronic sticky gloves that start to malfunction
at a very inconvenient time.
The movie is loud, swift and sleek. It’s not very good, but it’s not very bad. It does pull off the trick Hollywood has been trying to manage for a century – the trick of making an enjoyable movie without a story – but it does so on a technicality, since it’s only barely enjoyable.
And man is it tough to review!
SCORE
How Accomplished: 58/100
How Much I Enjoyed: 56/100
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