NO PLAN. NO BACKUP. NO CHOICE.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is sprung from a prison in Russia by his IMF colleagues, but when a subsequent mission is botched and a bomb destroys the Kremlin, Hunt’s team is disavowed.

For the fourth film in this franchise, The Incredibles (2004) director Brad Bird was hired and he brings some of that energy, sense of humor and classic spy trappings. His first non-animated film moves briskly between its exciting, outlandish action sequences (the highlight being a daring climb up the Burj Khalifa), although it loses steam somewhat in the last half-hour.

Cruise and his team (including high-profiled newcomer Jeremy Renner) are great fun to watch, diverting one’s attention from the silly story.

2011-U.S. 133 min. Color. Widescreen. Directed by Brad Bird. Screenplay: Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec. Music: Michael Giacchino. Cast: Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Jeremy Renner (William Brandt), Simon Pegg (Benji Dunn), Paula Patton, Michael Nyqvist, Léa Seydoux, Anil Kapoor. Cameos: Tom Wilkinson, Michelle Monaghan, Ving Rhames. 

Trivia: Co-produced by Cruise and J.J. Abrams. Christopher McQuarrie worked on the script. Also released in an IMAX 3D version. Followed by Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015).

Last word: “If you plan something well enough you can get what you want, no matter what the medium is. There’s a shot in the movie that no one notices, because you don’t want to pull them out of the movie, but it’s the kind of shot that you would normally only be able to do in animation because we go through a wall. But since I had the shot pre-visualized early we were able to build a special wall that allowed us to move it as soon as it was out of view and actually have the camera go to a place that it wouldn’t normally go. And that’s the kind of thing that you can do easily in animation.” (Bird, Indiewire)