One of 2011's best films, Brad Bird's "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" is a triumph. Injecting life into a plateauing franchise, the film is a crisp and charismatic action epic that is both exciting and propulsive.

All the right pieces come together to make this fourth Mission: Impossible film stand out. A Bondian dose of exotic locales, a story that ties together Cold War tension and New World rogues, and a gallery of well-cast characters combine to form a solid…

A hugely successful action film that can really be boiled down to the skills of one man: Brad Bird. He understands storytelling through action set pieces like so (frighteningly) few directors do, and knows a thing or two about distilling tension with humor and leading each scene to an inevitable conclusion without any predictability along the way. The Dubai set piece is action ballet. Talk about a smooth transition from animation to live action. You'd think there would be an…

Here's the thing about Ghost Protocol [EXPLOSION].

See that I lulled you into a false sense of security and then flipped things on their heads with unexpected action.

That's not so much what you'll get here, because when you think about the Tom Cruise era Mission: Impossible, you expect action. You think: is there a chance that chap might be a little bit gay? You think: surely this time they've bitten off more than they can chew and they can't…

What did I learn from Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol? Let me see. There are a lot of BMWs in Dubai and Mumbai (coincidence?) and they have safety features you can trust, and cool start controls, and cool wheels and cool grill-lights, what? I haven't seen such gross product placement in a while. Oh yeah, and iPhones. iPhones are cool, iPads are cool, apparently USB cables are cool; but iPhones in rubberised cases? I guess they might knock them around…

I feel like I’m swimming against the tide on this one, but here goes. Brad Bird is a gifted storyteller, and shows some considerable promise in this, his first live-action outing, but Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is a tepid follow-up to J.J. Abrams’ taut third entry in the Mission: Impossible series.

Where Abrams’ picture delivered a memorable screen villain in Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian, Ghost Protocol’s bad guys are bland and forgettable. Where M:I III contained moments of…

I was worried I wouldn't be able to follow this, having skipped the previous two installments in the series, but my concern was for naught. M:I-GP is 100% red-blooded American kick-ass spread across at least eight continents with A1 primo alpha male Tom Cruise lighting it up from Mumbai to Dubai and all the 'bais in between, too much straight-forward plot to bother with story. Until the very end, that is, when Cruise explains - gasp! - his wife was…

This movie is an absolute masterclass on action and suspense set-pieces.

The Dubai sequence, in particular, is one of the greatest set-pieces of any film in the history of cinema. It's not only because Tom Cruise climbed on the outside of the tallest building in the world (but hot damn, what spectacle that is!), but it's because everything goes wrong. Literally everything.

That's really the secret to good writing - conflict. If everything went according to plan, it wouldn't be…

In the days of Transformers and interconnected comic book universes, I cherish simplicity, and Ghost Protocol delivers simplicity. The bad guy wants to blow up a bomb, the good guys want to stop him, that is it. Since barely anytime is wasted on story beats, the film gets to focus on the wonder of the set piece, in which there are many. The little details and the spontaneity of events that occur gives this film a real pulse, which makes…

Brad Bird had a hard job on his hands and the success of the three previous films and their high octane thrills and spills was always going to be a difficult one to top. Fortunately for him they had a star prepared to go that little bit further in pursuit of action.
Cruise returns as I.M.F agent Ethan Hunt in this fourth instalment of the successful franchise,aided and abetted by another fine cast of support players that include the reliable…