mission impossible 4 movie review

After a rash of red-baiting anti-communist films in the early 1950s, the popular cinema of the English-speaking world largely abandoned communist villains in favour of conspiratorial freelance crooks (like "Spectre" in the Bond movies) and trouble-making renegades. This canny practice continues, and in the fourth big-screen spin-off of long-running TV espionage series Mission: Impossible the villain is Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), a deranged Swedish nuclear scientist trying to create a third world war by fomenting conflict between the United States and Russia. The plot is much the same as that in the latest Sherlock Holmes picture, though the aim here is the quite literal end of civilisation as we know it so that a newly cleansed world can open up for mankind.

This is the best movie in the franchise since Brian de Palma launched it in 1996, and the director is Brad Bird, an animator by training, who made Pixar's Ratatouille and The Incredibles. Here he has a budget large enough and an Imax screen wide enough to allow him to do anything he fancies. In consequence the movie is visually remarkable as it tries to keep up with the frenetic activities of secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise accepting an impossible mission for the fourth time) and his new trio of likable operatives: beautiful, resourceful Paula Patton, pawky computer wizard Simon Pegg and constantly fretting analyst Jeremy Renner.

With an ultra-violent pre-credit sequence in Budapest and a brief, sentimental coda in Seattle, the picture moves from an ingenious jail break in Moscow to Dubai and thence to Mumbai, and there are chases and shoot-outs as Hunt's team use their state-of-the-art equipment and considerable ingenuity to frustrate Hendricks. Two sequences are breathtaking. The first is an explosion that blows up half of the Kremlin. The second sees Cruise clinging to the plate-glass and stainless steel surface of the 130th floor of Dubai's Burj Khalifa tower, the world's tallest building, with only a pair of adhesive gloves to stop him falling. Bird manages the escalations from the preposterous through the more preposterous to the most preposterous with skill and wit, but there isn't much time for developing complex relationships when you're constantly accepting missions to save the world.