Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Not that one should take an action movie too seriously, or, especially, a Mission Impossible movie, but there should be some level of plausibility. I'm not talking about whether Tom Cruise can swing around the Burj Khalifa and walk around afterwords without a scratch, no, I can buy that. What I couldn't buy though, was the cartoonish fashion that MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL caked itself in. Brad Bird, a director of animated films for Pixar must have approached the film in this fashion, and in some of the action scenes this works. But Bird has no sense for what characters are like outside of being funny in a Pixar movie. Without being able to discern a colorful animated character from a colorful real-life character, Bird falters. For, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, in between its clunky, over-apparent chase scenes, is populated by downright weird dialogue. There's a congratulatory drink with the boys after the film seems to be over where everyone smiles and talks about how great they are, there's a shitty subplot with Paula Patton and Cruise's flirtation and then a throwaway subplot involving Jeremy Renner. But, like a cartoon, any problem or shocking twist that occurs within the film, eventually evens out like a bad sitcom never wanting to change the structure. There's flirtation with change, but no actual change. Instead, Bird supplies a few good scenes that should lace the film together, but don't because in the grand scheme of things, they just aren't that cool, and when all the characters get together at the end to convince (?) us that it was, it looks pretty stupid. Over-lauded, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL is a mess of bad screenwriting and misled direction. The only thing that does work is Tom Cruise, who despite his offscreen antics is really, most importantly, a movie star.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol: ★★1/2