If you have followed Tom Cruise's selection of films lately, you would have observed an over-reliance on action at the cost of other factors. "Mission Impossible 4" is no different.
This is indeed a trend observed among male movie stars. Ageing stars, who no longer have the confidence of their youth, resort to movies that have an overdose of sex and violence.
They unabashedly stay within the confines of done-to-death cliches to give you not a film, but a roughly stitched collage of some well done action sequences.
Thus, what is sacrificed at this altar of dreary cliches are story, characterization, plot, subplots.
But there’s always been a degree of cheek to the Mission: Impossible film series, which for 15 years has offered a knowing, but generally exciting, take on a 1960s TV series that pitted mask-happy, gadget-wielding spies against megalomaniacal madmen. In both the film and TV versions, any resemblance to actual espionage was purely coincidental.
Though J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III introduced some emotional stakes, the M:I movies have mostly served as a testing ground for how well a director could craft an exciting action sequence around Tom Cruise.
The story of Ghost Protocol is simpler than the elaborate charades you made up as kids. Smoked out of a Russian prison, Ethan Hunt and his renegade team, have to hunt down a Russian scientist with nuclear launch codes and save the world.
Along the way are some derivative dialogues, some pretences at making up subplots and but nevertheless a star who's committed to the art of the action sequence.
After seeing Ghost Protocol a discerning viewer (aka cynical movie critics) will say that Cruise has lost the plot, figuratively and literally. That all his recent films have been shoddy excuses in the name of cinema, save fore a few neat action sequences. There will be the requisite crack about the Church of Scientology and some lame reference to Oprah and couch jumping.
But let’s be clear, the Mission: Impossible series is exactly was it’s supposed to be: a finely tuned action machine, and the latest instalment in Ghost Protocol offers cutting-edge escapism that's almost guilt-free. Anybody expecting a Fellini film with a car chase is just being difficult for difficulty’s sake.
And when it comes to action no one does it better than Cruise. His work ethic is meticulous and anybody who’s willing to jump out of the Burj Khalifa gets my vote hands down.
Eschewing the personal relationships that bogged down the previous entry, Ghost Protocol starts fast and rarely lets up. The action scenes are astounding. They are elaborately conceptualized, beautifully shot and adeptly edited for maximum impact.
Cruise might have forgotten other things, but he hasn't forgotten the art of choosing the best action team in the industry.
The film thus ends up being a never-ending action ride from the windows of the world's tallest building, to the tunnel under the world's worst prison to the streets of Mumbai and into a parking lot apparently located in India, but which you know will not exist in the country for the next few decades.
If you want to watch the film for it being shot in India, and for Anil Kapoor, you'll be sorely disappointed.
Only two minutes of actual India make it to the film. The other shots thought to be filmed in the country, have actually been shot in Indian localities of North America.
Kapoor barely has a few minutes' role as a lecherous business tycoon. It's not enough either for his fans or his detractors.
From the perspective of the series as a whole, Ghost Protocol is easily the best instalment since the first one in 1996.
Your mission should you choose to accept it is 132 minutes of mind and reality bending action scenes, beautiful women, fast cars and a turbo charged escape from the banalities of every day life.
This review will self-destruct in five seconds.
The writer is a reporter at Dawn.com
