The Mission: Impossible” film franchise has further revved up its improbable thriller-spy-caper-chiller action in its latest and most truly “impossible” installment, “Ghost Protocol.”
Its crack and crackerjack team of top agents, led by Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, engage in a seemingly endless series of superhuman escapes and assaults that our poor sub-hero brain short-circuits as we try to keep up with their prodigiously brilliant and inventive schemes.
As for the members of the movie’s production and creative team, judging from their own perfervid imaginings, they seem to be on a constant action high induced by successive sniffs and whiffs of cinematic uppers!
The espionage team’s mission, as usual, is nothing short of averting the total obliteration of human life and civilization as we know it, through a master villain and supermonster’s instigation of global nuclear war.
Explosive devices
But, what can Cruise’s character do to help from his prison cell deep in Russia? No problem, just infiltrate the complex’s computers, plant portable explosive devices – and, kaboom!, the “Cruise missile” is free and active to save the world again!
“Ghost Protocol” banks on “impossible” feats of derring-do that call to mind James Bond’s own colorful and fantastic exploits but, does the Bond franchise one better by further hyping and speeding up its action, so that viewers are left dazed and breathless. Being superagents, however, Cruise and his team don’t appear to be even winded after all of those long chases!
Even more impossibly, their enemies are amazingly fit. The main villain, a middle-aged character, turns out to be as athletic as Cruise – with the help of a lot of visual trickery and clever editing, we imagine – and keeps up with him as he runs, leaps, lunges and falls through the flick’s long final sequence, stopping only to close his eyes – and die!
Technology
The film also banks on a lot of state-of-the-art technology and newfangled inventions, like portable nuclear device launchers, projection screens that surround the enemy in a cocoon of fake vistas and locales, and gloves that stick to glass surfaces and enable anyone to perform Spide-Man feats of speeded-up vertical locomotion.
Also on overdrive is the production’s use of a lot of “eye candy” in terms of exotic locations like Dubai and Mumbai (and other ay-yay-yay pleasure palaces in between), meant to delight both the tekkle and the sybarite, not to mention the inveterate and peripathetic armchair traveller – who’s exceedingly grateful when his armchair is converted into a combination travel and time machine, no extra charge!
Finally, Cruise and his lesser-known costars greatly benefit from the spectacular showcase that “Ghost Protocol” provides them. Paula Patton plays the spy team’s lone female member, and she looks good, acts well and is “deliciously” deadly with her fists and kicks.
But, the film “belongs” to Cruise, who amazes viewers with his physical feats of derring-do, which would exhaust a far younger action star. He must have trained for months to measure up to the role’s arduous demands – but, the “investment” has turned out to be worth it, because his star is now shining more brightly than ever!