Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)

  I finally got to go to the theater!  Rob has been wanting to see this since the first trailer came out.  I've never been a huge fan of the series but this one looked pretty decent.

No joke, I have now been banned by my boyfriend from discussing movies we see together for 24 hours after we've seen them.  Ghost Protocol sparked a two-hour long argument discussion.  He said I was overly critical.  Can you imagine?!  And why was I told this?  Because there is a certain revelation at the end of the film that I said ruined the experience for me.  I think that if movies are to be considered art, they must be held to the same level of criticism as any other art form.  If I had read this movie as a novel, I would have been very annoyed at said revelation because--to me--it squanders an opportunity to make a character a more complicated and thereby more interesting individual.  His opinion--which he is entitled to have--is that movies should be enjoyed for their entertainment value only.  I'm not saying that this movie should be on the same pedestal as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by any means, I'm just saying that I think it could have made more of itself and instead settled for being non-controversial.

The movie begins several years after MI3 and Benji (Simon Pegg) is a full-fledged field operative now.  One of his assignments is to break Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) out of a Russian prison.  Ethan is immediately brought back on board and told to break into the Kremlin and recover some data tapes.  Unfortunately, it's a trap and Ethan's team are the fall guys for an explosion that destroys a quarter of the building.  They all escape, mostly unharmed, and Ethan meets with the Director of IMF (Tom Wilkinson) who tells him that a supervillain codenamed Cobalt has stolen nuclear launch codes and now a trigger.  Ethan and his team must stop Cobalt before he can start WWIII.  To do this, Ethan and fellow teammate Brant (Jeremy Renner) must perform some stupidly dangerous stunts, like drop down a cooling shaft with a giant metal fan and scale the outside of the Burj Hotel in Dubai, all with no backup.  If they get caught, they'll be labeled terrorists and shot and if they fail, the world will end up a nuclear wasteland.

The stuntwork is really good in this film.  Tom Cruise stops a number of things with his face, like a BMW, a window ledge, and an automated parking garage.  That alone would be entertaining.  Jeremy Renner was funnier than I thought he would be.  He has a cute little exchange with Simon Pegg that I enjoyed.  Really, there was nothing to keep this from being a fun little piece of brain candy except for that exchange at the end.  I was so disappointed in that.