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Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

I wasn’t planning to see this in the theater, but went a few weeks after it was released because of its 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. For one of the rare times, I completely disagree with RT.

Character

Simon Pegg was clearly the comic relief and I liked him. Jeremy Renner was the problem. His character was muddled, at times also comic relief (and it was stupid to have two character do that), at times mysterious, and then it turned out he was skilled like the others. More importantly, these disparate elements happened randomly. Meaning, I understood the mysterious turning into the truth about his background, but even after the truth was revealed, he seemed to be clueless about some things, then acted like Pegg, etc.

Little things

My spirit was dampened at the end of the opening chase scene when that agent was killed by the woman. It felt so false for him to not suspect a strange, pretty woman who just so happened to be walking in that deserted back-alley at that time. That same scene on a regular street or a blindside ambush in the alley would have been much better.

Tom Cruise scaling the outside of the hotel tower was the major set piece and, while it was cool in its own right, it failed in the area of plausibility. How did no one inside the hotel see him climb it? And, after getting in to the server room, how come Tom didn’t do the safer thing and exit the room from the door and take the elevator down? Good action movies do not ignore such issues.

Logic and Structure/Plot

In the hotel sequence, how did the blonde woman (who stole the documents in the opening) not know what her buyer looked like? This was a major turning point in the story and it rested on something so flimsy. That officially took me out of the movie and I watched the rest without caring what happened.

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