Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Brad Bird’s 2011 film is assembled as four separate heists: the Kremlin, the tower in Dubai, Mumbai and the closing car park. Each contains a piece of equipment that fails, and the repetition stops being a joke and becomes the structure. The tension across these 133 minutes does not come from the nuclear plot but from whether an adhesive glove or a face-mask printer will hold. The ordering shapes the whole film. The tower climb is followed immediately by the sandstorm chase, so the peak lands midway through the second act and the Mumbai finale is necessarily smaller. Bird holds his action in wide, sustained shots that keep the geography of a space legible, which reads as an animator’s answer to the jittery spy cutting of the period. Two production details matter. Roughly thirty minutes of the film was shot directly with IMAX film cameras. Tom Cruise appears to be climbing the tower free, but he was attached to the building by multiple cables throughout, and Industrial Light and Magic erased them afterwards. It opened in IMAX on 16 December before its general release on 21 December, and reached 694.7 million dollars worldwide. Go in for the pleasure of watching mechanisms work or fail. Avoid it if you want the espionage story itself to be intricate.