Mission: Impossible review

Except for all the talking, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a great movie.



Under Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) direction, the action scenes are incredible. Impossible, too, but the whole movie is based on that, so who cares?  Who cares about dangling from the 134th floor of the world's tallest building swinging from a computer cable.  Who cares about head-on collisions and sprinting through sandstorms.  It's so much fun!

And nothing is funner than the chase and fight in a parking garage with shifting parking spaces--and another head-on collision.

But the talking and talking.  It's really too much.  And really boring.  Way too much explanation of what happened, what happened before that, and what's going to happen later, and why, and why Jeremy Renner is all mopey and scared.  I can't write fiction, good narratives, and certainly not screenplays, but I think it's cheap when we find out a character's feelings by him announcing, "This is how I'm feeling."

So, for all the action the movie is completely worth your ten bucks.  But on the other hand, during the sitting around and talking times, you can reflect on how much better Brad Bird's best action movie really is.  There's no wasted dialogue at all in The Incredibles.