- UK release: December 2011
- Director: Brad Bird · Writers: Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; Bad Robot; Skydance
- Genre: Espionage action adventure · Runtime: 133 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Tom Cruise (Top Gun, Mission: Impossible) as Ethan Hunt; Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) as William Brandt; Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Star Trek) as Benji Dunn; Paula Patton (Déjà Vu) as Jane Carter
- IMDb: 7.4 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 94% critics / 76% audience · My rating: 9 / 10
This series has never quite known what it wants to be. Brian De Palma’s 1996 original was a paranoid puzzle box, John Woo’s second instalment a slow-motion ballet of doves and motorbikes, and J. J. Abrams’s third the one that finally remembered Ethan Hunt is supposed to have a team and a pulse. Now Paramount has handed the fourth film to Brad Bird, a man who has never directed live action in his life, having spent his career on The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. It sounds like a gamble. It turns out to be the smartest decision the franchise has made.
The setup
The IMF is framed for an attack on the Kremlin, the agency is disowned, and Hunt and a small team of survivors are cut loose with no backup, no support and a ticking nuclear scenario to unpick. The hunt for a nihilist who wants to reset the world by force runs from a Moscow prison through the spires of Dubai and out to Mumbai, the team improvising with half-working gadgets and no safety net. The plot, as ever in this series, is mostly a delivery system for set pieces, but the disavowed-agents framing gives the whole thing a scrappy, against-the-odds energy the earlier films sometimes lacked.
The cast
Cruise is the engine, and at forty-nine he is still throwing himself at this with an intensity that borders on alarming. Hunt has rarely felt this fallible: he gets things wrong, the gear fails, and the film is happy to let him look mortal. The shrewd move is building a genuine ensemble around him. Simon Pegg, promoted from a one-scene cameo in the third film to a full field role, is the comic release valve, and his nervy, delighted Benji keeps the tone from curdling into self-seriousness. Jeremy Renner arrives as Brandt, an analyst with a buried past and a reason to watch Hunt warily, and he brings a coiled, watchful quality that suggests the series is thinking about its future. Paula Patton’s Jane Carter carries the team’s grief and gets the cleanest revenge arc, holding her own in the action without being reduced to decoration. They behave like people who actually like one another, which is rarer in this genre than it should be.
The craft
Bird’s animation background turns out to be the asset, not the liability. He stages action with absolute clarity, every beat legible, every space established before it is wrecked, so you always know where everyone is and what the stakes of the next move are. The centrepiece is Hunt’s climb up the outside of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, on a pair of failing adhesive gloves, and it is one of the great vertigo sequences in modern cinema, shot high and real enough that your palms sweat. Robert Elswit’s photography makes Dubai look like glass and furnace heat, and Michael Giacchino threads Lalo Schifrin’s old theme through a score that knows exactly when to surge and when to hold its breath. A Mumbai car park finale and a sandstorm chase keep the invention coming. At a hair over two hours the film barely pauses, and it never feels padded.
How it stacks up
Set beside its own franchise, this is the most purely enjoyable entry since the original, and a clear step up on the second. The Abrams film gave the series its heart back; Bird gives it back its sense of play. The obvious wider comparison is Bond, then in its grim Quantum of Solace phase, and where that series had turned dour, Ghost Protocol remembers that globe-trotting espionage is supposed to be fun. There is a touch of The Incredibles in the team dynamic too, a group of gifted people bickering their way through impossible odds. Few action films this year are this confident about what they are.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting at 94%, with the Burj Khalifa sequence singled out almost everywhere and Bird’s clean staging widely praised as the reinvention the series needed. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm at 76%, a gap that usually means the plot mechanics left some viewers cold even as the spectacle won them over. I land with the critics here, and a notch above the crowd. The villain is thinly drawn and the nuclear countdown is boilerplate, but those are the parts of the film nobody remembers. What you remember is the gloves slipping a thousand feet up, and the cut to a delighted Benji at his console, and that is the film working exactly as intended.
Verdict
This is the rare blockbuster that rewards a second and third watch rather than wearing thin. It is built on real stunts and clear geography rather than digital mush, it has a team you enjoy spending time with, and it has at least one sequence that belongs in any decent action highlight reel. The story is functional and the antagonist forgettable, but the craft, the pace and the sheer good humour carry it past those gaps with room to spare. As a piece of rewatchable, intelligently staged action entertainment it is near the top of its class. 9⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, with selected IMAX screenings from 21 December where the Burj Khalifa sequence is shown at its full, terrifying scale.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the Brandt thread paid off as the series kept its ensemble shape, and Christopher McQuarrie took over to push the practical-stunt approach even further in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) and Fallout (2018), the latter now widely held up as the franchise’s high point. Bird’s film is generally credited as the one that set that template, the moment the series committed fully to real, vertiginous stunt work over digital spectacle. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on Paramount+ depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat, injury detail. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Scenes of moderate violence are loud, although there is little focus on the impact of the blows and kicks. In one scene, two men are shot in their heads and there is brief bloody detail. In another scene, a man is shot in the back, accompanied by small impact wounds.
Threat and horror: There are frequent intense action sequences, including car chases and a prison riot.
Language: There is some mild bad language, including ‘shit’.
Injury detail: There is brief sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
Sex: There is no sexual content beyond kissing.
Alcohol and smoking: Adult characters smoke and drink.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
