Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

It’s after 11 P.M., one of the final showings of the night, but the theater is sufficiently full despite the late hours. Caitlin Gamble watches alongside a few friends including Mission Impossible fans Mike Dejos and Frankie Taddie.

Onscreen, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) slips on a pair of special gloves that will enable him to climb walls without the aid of ropes and harnesses. He takes note of his fellow agent’s instructions for using the light-up gloves: “Blue is glue, red is dead.”

Hunt removes a window from the building he’s standing in and leaps out onto the wall of the building’s exterior. He climbs several stories, slapping his gloves to the building’s surface to engage the gloves’ gripping properties and uses a rolling motion to disengage them. His right glove soon begins to die, glowing the dreaded color red. Hunt flings the useless glove off and reaches his destination using just one glove.

After completing his task on the assigned floor, he descends the building using a cord that’s too short to reach the broken window below him. Rather than panicking as he hangs hundreds of feet above the ground, Hunt detaches his cord and leaps dangerously toward the window where his team is waiting for him. There’s more in store for him in this mission than he knows.

With it’s combination of action and disparate elements—codes, sunken cars, diamonds and gloves that help Ethan Hunt climb the walls of the Buri Khalifa, the tallest building in the world—Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol is probably best suited for those with great attention spans and lovers of complex plots. (It might be a good idea to read up on the film before viewing it.) But the movie’s complicated storyline is kept fresh with scenes that are ingenious and cool for audience members like Gamble to watch.

The plot can be summarized as such: Walking casually along, a tall young woman in a trench coat shoots an ‘Impossible Mission Force’ (IMF) member several times, leaving him to die. The dead agent had been on assignment to locate a person code-named “Cobalt.” Continuing the mission without their fellow agent, Hunt and his IMF team travel to the Kremlin (the house of the Russian government) to produce files on Cobalt. But the Kremlin is bombed upon their arrival, and the unknown cause of the bomb leads Russia to suspect the IMF to be the culprits, considering them terrorists. The U.S., as a result, denies support to the IMF, leaving Hunt and his team to crack the case on their own under “Ghost Protocol”: They must track down “Cobalt” before he launches a nuclear missile at America.

The action scenes of the film are complimented with hints of beauty, humor and even some sentimental moments. Gamble says that though she is partial to ‘chick flicks,’ and has never seen any of the previous Mission Impossible installments, she was pleasantly surprised by the film.

“I would definitely recommend this movie to others,” she said. “Mission Impossible is a movie that could appeal to a wide range of audiences, as well as different age groups.”

Her favorite scene was one at the end of the movie when Hunt waves, smiling, to a certain person (not to give the ending away) at the end of film who was creatively woven into the plot. 

Gamble also enjoyed the part of the movie that was set in the Middle Eastern city of Dubai, which added an element of beauty to the plot.           

Overall, Mission Impossible 4 is a cleverly produced film that might even be worth watching twice. Audience members who pay careful attention and use some critical thinking skills will get the most out of the film.