As the last pictures of the movie fade on the movie screen, there is a smattering of applause before the audience gets up to leave, and by the time the credits are rolling, there is no one left in the theatre. The only trace of them are half-consumed buckets of large popcorn and soda cups sitting in their rightful cup holders. That’s how you feel when “Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol” ends – nothing special, it’s a movie with plenty of predictable action, including a car chase that takes place halfway around the world and futuristic devices and weapons, just like every other action/adventure movie out there. For the hype it has received over the past couple of years, one can say that the film wasn’t worth it.
The Mission Impossible series is a franchise that has gotten attention from all over the country since its first movie in the 1990s. The consistent character is Ethan Hunt, a legendary spy that is known to get the job done, who is played by Tom Cruise. Paula Patton, Jeremy Renner, and Simon Pegg star in this action-packed movie. Paula Patton plays the dangerously stunning Jane Carter, Simon Pegg plays Benji Dunn, the inexperienced and brainy spy, and Jeremy Renner stars as William Brandt, an analyst with a secretive past. The movie follows this team of four as they race from India to Hungary, attempting to stop a Russian terrorist, codennamed Cobalt, from lighting a nuclear bomb that will leave the earth in ruins.
The story line, behind all the glamour and tricks on the green screen, is simple. Do whatever you can to stop the crazy Russian terrorist from activating the bomb through the satellite. The movie uses new technology at every turn, whether it be a screen projector that tricks the eye, contact lenses that can print pages, or a magnetic rover used to lift a person above a spinning fan. By using all this technology and the unnecessary problems that keep popping up, the film drags on for about an hour and a half longer than it needs to.
There is no lack of scenes where Hunt is *this* close to being killed, when hanging off the tallest building in the world with one hand, for example, and soon they become repetitive and boring, like a sandwich that has been eaten a thousand times. Even though the interactions between the characters leave little to be desired, the supernatural abilities that Hunt develops as the movie progresses seem unrealistic and everything soon begins to look just a little too coincidental.
But the movie isn’t all horrible – there are a few good ideas that are exciting and fun, but the rest of the film is something the public has seen millions of times in millions of different movies only with a different cast and a different plot. But the polite applause after the movie and the way the theatre is empty by the time the credits roll tell the public’s view- the movie isn’t original, it isn’t funny, it isn’t exciting, and it doesn’t make your heart stop because of the suspense. If graded on a scale of 1 through 5, Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol would receive a low 1.5 out of 5.