Ghost Protocol

The last Tom Cruise movie I had seen until recently was the first Mission Impossible.  I have kind of been against Tom Cruise for the past few years, and my opinion of him started to change after seeing him in an episode of Top Gear which was a particularly good episode.  Having cable for the first time in my life as of August along with a DVR, I have started recording all sorts of movies to watch, and a few of those have been Tom Cruise films.  Some of those include Tropic Thunder  (not really a Tom Cruise film, but he's in it), The Last Samurai, and Mission Impossible III.  Smartly, I skipped Mission Impossible II.  So probably not since Far and Away, I actually went to a Tom Cruise film in theaters, Ghost Protocol.

There are several things that have been appealing to me about this movie.  First, I am a big fan of Simon Pegg, and he has a somewhat bigger role in this one than he did the third; second, I like Brad Bird, as the director of The Incredibles which is one of my favorite Pixar movies and The Iron Giant, I was excited to see him doing live action; and third, I haven't seen him in much, but I see good things coming from Jeremy Renner like taking over the Bourne franchise, and I am also anxious to see his role as Hawkeye in the upcoming Avengers film.  All of these elements combined with the fact that Sawyer from Lost makes an appearance and that I am warming up to Tom Cruise as of late, Ghost Protocol made it to my short list of movies I would see this holiday season if I got the chance.

The set up of this installment in the adventures of Ethan Hunt, IMF agent extraordinaire, is that a baddie  codenamed 'Cobalt' has an IMF agent assassinated, and while Hunt is trying to infiltrate the Kremlin to learn Cobalt's identity the operation goes sour, and the IMF as a covert agency dissolves declaring Ghost Protocol meaning Cruise and his team are on their own without any government sanction or funding.  It is up to them to either disappear or go rogue in an effort to get to the bottom of identifying Cobalt and stopping his sinister schemes.  It was an action-packed, suspenseful, well-wrought spy movie.  It also had excellent visuals and made really nice use of the theater's sound system.  It was filmed in exotic locations such as Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai; and it included compelling comic relief from Pegg, solid support from Renner, along with a gorgeous BMW i8 concept car.  It has been five years since Mission Impossible III, and even though I didn't see it until a couple of weeks ago, it was worth the wait.