Mission: Imposible - Ghost Protocall

I enjoyed it but I have a low threshold for silly action movies

There was some awful acting in between the stuns. Jeremy Renner explaining why he wasn't a field operative any more was really really cheesy, for example.

Saw this just before my trip of to Vegas last week.

I thought it was good and entertaining, but I feel MI3 was still the better film. As much as I like the actors who played Ethan Hunt's team this time around, they concentrated on their character arcs a little too much. At one point, Renner's character actually does a soap opera sigh and lean before a monologue. And there's so many little missions in this film and we have to go through their preparation phase for all of them; the overall goal is easy to forget. Once again we get Cruise's character in a fight with a villain who probably has no business engaging him in this way, but at least Phillip Seymour Hoffman was interesting and menacing in the previous installment. It's a good popcorn flick for the moments of genuine awe and danger, but MI3 is still the best of the franchise in my book for the tighter storytelling.

I really liked it, it felt more like a Movie version of the Mission Impossible TV series (especially the retro misson in The Kremlin, which had the old music stings and everything). I also liked how the team felt more of an ensemble, with all the members of the team having character development and things to do. Another nice touch was an increase in 'realism', not that its actually realistic but they made the technology less like magic and more like real fallible technology (though that may have been overdone slightly) and the characters actually expressed concern about the crazy things they weren having to do. All that helped make the missions seem more impossible.

For me, it was up there with the first one.

I thought it was good, solid escapism with some great set-piece action scenes. The chase through the sandstorm I felt was very well done, for example. Cruise was in his comfort zone. Simon Pegg was very funny and Brad Bird cemented his stature as a go-to guy for non-idiotic directorial competence.

The wife and I went to see this flick this week. We enjoyed it. There was a constant sense of tension as the team was pretty much playing catch-up the entire movie.

I liked the fact that the Ethan Hunt character took more of a leadership role in the movie. Sure, he was team leader in the other ones, but this one seemed to spread the action around to the rest of the team nicely. They all got moments to shine, and we liked that. In fact, Hunt was so leaderly in this one that I rather expected him to be the director of IMF by the end of the movie. And he was kinda, with the way he handed out the phones to his three teammates at the end. Whatever his actual rank, he does seem to be pretty high up in the organization’s ladder. But to have him accepting a mission at the very end of the movie kinda broke that line of reasoning.

I often tell the wife that I know to much to truly enjoy certain things as presented in movies. The big one that jumped out at me in this movie was the scene where Hunt and the other team member are being shot at under water. Sure it's a nice effect, but I watch Mythbusters. And because I do, I know that any bullet loses pretty much all of its power within six inches of hitting water. The Mythbusters tested that at with much closer range, and with a variety of weapon powers. The more powerful the weapon, the more the bullet loses when it hits the water, with .50 cal sniper rifle bulets disintigrating pretty much on contact with the water. So that scene, while fun and dramatic, is not at all realistic.

One other thing we noticed with some of the very close ups of Tom’s face is the man is starting to show his age. He will be 50 later this year.