Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) (Monday, January 16, 2012) (138)

Somehow I missed Mission: Impossible 3, directed by J.J. Abrams. I can't say I really regret missing it, but it is a fact I had to deal with as I watched Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. It seems that all that's really important about the third film is that hero Ethan Hunt (wow - that name totally screams "straight American man"!) (Tom Cruise) got married to a lady and killed some dudes on a train and went to jail in Russia. That's basically where this fourth movie begins.

Ethan is broken out of jail and his team is all there and they're working on getting back some Russian nuclear submarine launch codes from some French people who stole them. Because 2011 is actually 1979. It seems the Frenchies want to sell the codes to a Swedish journalist, Mikael Blomkvist... er... rather a Swedish arms dealer (there are lots of them. Really. The unfinished Bergman film was a sequel to Lord of War. Really.) who wants to create a nuclear war to kill weak humans. Eugenics is fun! Oh - and the French lady super thief loves diamonds... and is willing to sell the codes for something like $300,000 in loose stones. Because that's the cost of nuclear war.

So this deal is going to take place in Dubai, because Dubai is very friendly to film crews who don't care about slavery, inside the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will also require Ethan to scale the outside of the building with special suction gloves... which don't work, of course. Ooops. It seems the deal goes wrong and there's more chasing and explosions.

Aside from the totally dated, recycled and ridiculous plot, this is actually a lot of fun. Lots of the story elements were big and blew up well. The final battle inside an automated garage tower was clever, though silly. I was a bit upset that the scaling-the-outside-of-the-tallest-building-in-the-world scene was so quick (like about three minutes). Director Brad Bird made it look great, but it was over before I got a good sense of it.

There was also a ton of homoeroticism between Ethan and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), a new team member. They're both really skinny and good at "hand-to-hand combat". They both run really fast and their verbal jousting was only lightly veiled. ("I'll tell you my secret if you tell me yours.") This was mostly fun and didn't get in the way of the stupid story otherwise... though I would have loved if they had just decided to screw... which would have been the biggest bang of all. Alas.

Stars: 2 of 4