If someone had told me ten years ago that Brad Bird, the writer/director of the quirky, entertaining and rather moving hand-drawn animated feature film The Iron Giant, which bowled over critics but underwhelmed most audiences, would go on to direct arguably the best installment of the Mission Impossible film franchise headlined by Tom Cruise, I would probably have dismissed them as crazy.
Twelve years later, I've seen the actual product and still can't believe how good it actually was, especially considering how little I enjoyed the three M:I movies that came before it.
Since much of the narrative of the story is propelled by twists and surprises and can be somewhat convoluted, I'll sum up the plot by saying that a mysterious individual named Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) has gotten hold of a device with which to initiate a Russian nuclear missile strike, and has managed to frame the Americans for doing so. Now, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his Impossible Mission Force team of Carter (Paula Patton), Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Brandt (Jeremy Renner) have to find Hendricks before he is able to actually launch any missiles.
The story isn't particularly novel; it hearkens back to the 1997 film The Peacemaker starring George Clooney in which the protagonists had to hunt down a man who stole a single nuclear warhead from the Russians. The difference is mainly in the execution; Bird's film is superior in nearly every way, whether it's the staging of the action sequences or in building genuine suspense, which is not the easiest thing to do considering that, this being a franchise film, it's practically a given that the good guys are going to win the day.
I probably should not have expected anything less from the director of the animated tour de force that was The Incredibles, but as high as my expectations were this film managed to even exceed them. Although the script is credited to Andre Nemec and Josh Applebaum I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Bird, who wrote The Incredibles and his Pixar studios follow-up Ratatouille as well as directing them, had at least some writing input; it feels, at several points, like something he might have written.
Perhaps what this film has over any of the others is that all throughout, Bird maintains the "team" spirit that made the original TV series such a hit with its audience. In the first film the entire team, save for Cruise's Hunt and Ving Rhames' Luther Stickwell, was wiped out by the end of the first act. In the second film, the only "team" to speak of was Hunt and his long hair, while in the third film, which had a fantastic villain in Philip Seymour Hoffman, was moving along pretty nicely until the climax, when writer-director J.J. Abrams decided that the only way Hunt could take down the extremely clever bad guy was pummel him to death. In Bird's film, however, the climax is divided into two parts as Hunt has to chase down the Nyqvist's Hendrick's while his team has to chase down his right hand and undo what he has done. Without the efforts of one, the other's efforts are useless. Also, even well before the climax, Cruise's co-stars, particularly The Hurt Locker star and man of the moment, Jeremy Renner, had some pretty generous helpings of screen time. I welcomed this development wholeheartedly as Patton is quite easy on the eyes, and because I can never get enough of the hilarious Pegg, who plays his comic talents quite to the hilt in this film and even gets quite a heroic moment at the end of it.
What made the film riveting for me to watch, however, was the fact that for the most part, even though the good guys were always going to get the bad guys, the filmmakers were able to keep me wondering how exactly they were going to do that. One thing that helped, I think was taking a page of The Peacemaker and making the arch villain someone who was not only quite formidable but who had apparently nothing to lose, which made him that much more dangerous.
The Mission: Impossible films have never been wanting in terms of technical proficiency. The production value of each and every one of them, no matter how forgettable the script, has been pretty much top caliber. The areas in which they've been wanting are directors and writers who were ready to accompany all this style with a little substance. Perhaps the closest they got to this prior to this film was the effort of Abrams and his team, but with Bird and his scriptwriters the franchise has finally gotten the creative shot in the arm it has needed all along.
When late in the film, Hunt breathes the words, "Mission accomplished" I could not help but agree.
4.5/5
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