If you watched the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol you may have noticed something strange, namely that it wasn’t being sold as a Tom Cruise vehicle. Tom was there, of course, playing Ethan Hunt, leading light of the IMF – not the International Monetary Fund but the Impossible Missions Force, though the two often seem like the same thing – but he wasn’t the main attraction. The trailer focused on the daring stunts and hi-tech gadgets, not so much on Tom looking heroic – because Tom Cruise is divisive nowadays, his sometimes extreme public persona (Oprah’s couch, the Scientology) alienating many of his ex-fans.
The thing about Cruise is that he’s never seemed quite real. His smile is too dazzling, his charm too aggressive (that’s why he seemed so bizarre in that Oprah Winfrey interview, bouncing off the walls even as he claimed to be in love). Cruise uses movie-star glamour not just as a weapon – as e.g. George Clooney does – but also as a shield, to conceal the real person. In fact, he uses glamour in much the same way that Ethan Hunt uses technology, a point made quite literally in the opening act of Ghost Protocol when Ethan and his techie Benji (Simon Pegg) infiltrate the Kremlin. They need access to a corridor, watched over by a single guard – so they switch on their hi-tech gizmos and create a projected image of the corridor, calibrated to the focal length of the guard’s eyes. He thinks he’s looking at the corridor – but in fact he’s looking at a movie, with Tom Cruise hiding behind the screen.
The point in Ghost Protocol – which Cruise produced as well as starring in, so it’s clearly a personal project as much as a blockbuster – is that technology malfunctions. The IMF gets “disavowed”, i.e. shut down, after it’s implicated in the bombing of the Kremlin; Ethan and his team are fugitives, pursued by Russian cops and left to their own devices as they try to stop a madman (Michael Nyqvist) who’s planning to incite a nuclear war.
Even in the first act, technology isn’t perfect: an agent is gunned down by a female assassin just seconds before his fancy smartphone identifies her as an assassin (oddly enough, gadgets struggle to keep up with human beings). By the time we get to the second act – set in Dubai, where our hero scales the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world – the gizmos are starting to fail altogether. Ethan uses sticky gloves to make his way up the tower; a blue light comes on when the gloves are activated. Remember, says Benji, “blue is glue!”. “And red?” asks Ethan. “Dead.” Good to know – though not very helpful when the light turns red 130 storeys up, leaving our hero hanging on by his fingertips.
The sticky gloves don’t work; Ethan has to swing on a cable, like Tarzan, and dangle off the edge with Brandt (Jeremy Renner) desperately holding on to his ankles. The latex masks (a Mission: Impossible trademark) don’t work, either; Ethan has to go in as himself, posing as Nyqvist’s minion in a meeting with the aforementioned assassin (the notion that minion and assassin don’t know what the other one looks like is the film’s only major implausibility). By the time we get to the third act, in Mumbai, technology has become almost irrelevant, the team’s hi-tech plan to hack the server and deactivate launch codes giving way to chases and shoot-outs.
You don’t have to care about any of this to appreciate Ghost Protocol. It’s big-budget fun, sleekly directed by Brad Bird whose background is in animation (he made The Incredibles (2004), a great action flick that just happens to be a cartoon). Yet the theme is there, human frailty – or just human emotion – breaking through the shield of glamorous technology. Jane (Paula Patton) gives in to anger, hurling the female assassin off the edge when it might’ve been more expedient to keep her alive. Brandt is tortured by guilt, having failed to protect Ethan’s wife years ago – and Ethan himself shows the loving husband behind the professional at the very end, a kind of human contact that’s even more affecting for taking place at arm’s length. (It’s like Tom Cruise is saying: ‘This is the best I can do’.) Then there’s the Burj Khalifa sequence, an almost unbearable nail-biter for viewers with a fear of heights – though in fact I was even more terrified by the similar scene in Tower Heist, maybe because the dangling man in that case was hapless Matthew Broderick whereas here it’s Mr. Cruise, and you know nothing bad can happen to Tom Cruise. Even “disavowed”, he’s still a movie star.
DIRECTED BY Brad Bird
STARRING Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg
US 2011 133 mins
