The 5 Biggest Problems with Ghost Protocol

It’s delighted both critics and audiences, but is the latest Mission Impossible movie headed towards a severe backlash?

Now let me get this out of the way, I love Ghost Protocol. It’s one of my favorite movies of 2011. And I am very happy for the film’s director Brad Bird who had made some of the best movies the previous decade but hadn’t been getting the credit because they were animated. His talent for combining interesting characters and thrilling action scenes is incredible (no pun intended.) This is easily my favorite entry in the Mission Impossible franchise and I would recommend it to anyone without reservations.

But…

Have you ever had someone tell you they don’t like one of your favorite movies? And you get ready to defend it but when they explain their problems with it you realize they actually have a point? That there was something you missed all along? Well Ghost Protocol has plenty of ammunition for its critics. What are they? Spoilers ahead.

The villain – I left that lower case deliberately. Who is he? No really if you ran into him in the parking lot in LA would you recognize him? Would you recognize the lead henchman? I doubt it. This is a problem. Villains in this kind of movie need to stand out. To be fair Michael Nyqvist who plays Hendricks and Samuli Edelmann who plays Wistrom are very good actors. But you need to be more than good actor in a movie like this. You need to have enough presence that you’re not being upstaged by what’s going on around you. See Alan Rickman as a classic example. What’s really frustrating is that the movie boasts actors like Josh Holloway and Anil Kapoor who HAVE that level of screen presence. Kapoor is slated to be the Indian Jack Bauer! The one villain who does command our attention is Sabine Moreau played by Lea Seydoux. Her angelic beauty makes a nice contrast to violence that follows her character.

Having the proper actors is of little help if they aren’t given enough to do. This is another problem. The villains are kept vague. Their plans and methods are murky. Hendricks plans to start a nuclear war. Okay, what exactly is Wistrom getting out of this? What did he pay him with, a lifetime supply of fresh water, beef jerky and a deluxe survival bunker? Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows isn’t getting nearly the love that Ghost Protocol is but the movies are very similar. The difference is Game of Shadows has an excellent villain whose methods and motives make sense in terms of the movie.

The Mask – Big spoiler here. At the end of the otherwise magnificent scene in Dubia, Ethan Hunt is chases Wistrom through a sandstorm. Suddenly he pulls off a piece of the man’s face! He’s wearing a mask! Who could it be? It turns out to be Hendricks. Okay. First that’s not much of a twist for the mastermind to impersonate his own henchman. Secondly why? Why would they bother with such a charade in the first place? Is Wistrom really innocent? No, he appears with Hendricks in India performing the usual henchman role. So what was that mask about?

Brandt – This is my biggest pet peeve in writing, when people don’t act the way they should. You have a character who is revealed to be a traitor, except that special piece of equipment he gave the hero turns out to be perfectly functional (see Blade 2.) In this case of Jeremy Renner’s Brandt his introduced as an analyst and for the first half of the movie he acts that way, clumsy, not very helpful in the field. Then it’s revealed he’s an experienced field agent. This isn’t much of a spoiler since the trailer shows Brandt and Ethan Hunt exchanging gun fu moves with each other. The problem is, if Brandt is a former field agent he should act like one. He should not be babbling like a scared kid after he and Ethan first escape. He should know that constantly nattering about the time limit as Ethan dangles outside an impossibly tall building isn’t helping.

The Backstory – This is a like it/hate it area with me. I like what they did with Ethan’s story. But I hate that it’s conveyed totally second hand. When this movie opens it’s hard to tell what happened in the time after MI3. To review at the end of MI3 Ethan’s wife discovered his secret identity and had been brought into the IMF. Slowly it’s revealed what happened to her and to Ethan. But we never see any of it. We only hear about it second hand. As it turns out, this stuff isn’t just important to Ethan. This backstory effects another member of the team as well. Again to be fair it does create a bit of mystery in the final scene. We’re not completely sure if Ethan is telling the truth or if he’s just trying to comfort somebody else. But that one scene doesn’t make up for others which are static and dramatically dead. Brad Bird is a stickler for the rules of good drama, but he should remember next time “Thou Shalt Not Use Flashbacks” does not trump “Thou Shalt Always Convey Important Information Visually.”

The Big Finale – I’m not talking about the battle between Ethan and Hendricks in the automated car park. That scene is awesome. But it contrasts that with what the rest of the team is doing at that moment; trying to get power back to the TV station. It’s like they ran out of clever things for the rest of the cast to do. If I’m going to give Brad Bird credit for the rest movie where he perfectly balances this cast of characters, then I have to ding him for this sequence where it take 3 highly trained operatives to take down one henchman and turn the lights back on. Take out the battle in the car park and imagine if the TV station sequence was the climax to the film. The audience would throw their popcorn at the screen. Compare this to the Dubai sequence where everyone got to shine in their own way.

The backlash may have already started. See this opinion piece at the Hollywood Reporter. Let me repeat this is one of my favorite movies. Its strengths far, far exceed its weaknesses in my opinion. The action scenes are some of the best I’ve seen in years. The cast has great camaraderie. But in the future if this winds up on somebody’s list of “Movies That Everyone Loves But I Don’t Get” I’ll understand why.