82 - Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

    After a mission goes bad, with another party bombing the Kremlin, the IMF is disavowed by the US Government.  Ethan Hunt pulls together what team he has to go after the real perpetrators, in an effort to clear his name, and prevent nuclear war.
    I remember having some positive, but slightly mixed feelings about this one when I first saw it.  I picked it up on Blu-ray for a cheap price, knowing that I'd come back to it.  I decided to show it to Cathy.
    I'm sad to say that it didn't play as well the second time.  The action is still satisfying, but the weaknesses in the script seem more glaring.  There's one thing in particular that bugs me, and it's common enough that it's hard to pin this movie with being especially bad.  I hate having punchlines to sequences.  A little gag to end a scene with just makes me cringe.  I've brought it up as my primary complaint about Batman Begins.  When I see it in this, I see it coming, and my hopes aren't as high, but I still feel like leaving the room every time I hear one of these lines.
    They aren't funny.  They seem obligatory.  Maybe they're funny for younger viewers.  I seem to remember thinking that some of the punchlines in other movies were funny.  The "no ticket" joke in Last Crusade was hilarious when I first saw it… when I was about 8 years old.
    What stuck out on this viewing was the personal story arc for Cruise's Hunt.  I kind of like the mystery about why he's in the prison at the start of the movie, and having the backstory revealed throughout the picture is a nice way of making it keep moving forward.  But having his backstory tie into Jeremy Renner's background just made it feel too convenient.  Mission: Impossible is never about convenience.  It's about impeccable planning, sorting out every possible contingency, so that the plan can't fail.
    Anyway, the thing that I got annoyed about was the way that this movie seems to serve one purpose in a larger narrative - to undo the steps taken in the third movie.  It seemed a little silly to have Hunt get married in the third one, but I was so distracted by Philip Seymour Hoffman's work that I was willing to ignore the main character arc.  This story seems to exist only to correct the storytelling limits that the third movie placed on the franchise.
    I don't think this means that I won't watch it again.  I like it.  I especially love seeing Simon Pegg.  I realized part of why I enjoy seeing him.  It's because he's so enthusiastic, he seems like a genuine fan of whatever movie he's in.