Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol understands that easy breezy accomplishment can never register the same level of excitement as a dangerous fluke. Seeing Tom Cruise slip effortlessly between steel ventilation teeth absolutely raises a smile but it's nothing compared to a clammy leer at the actor struggling up the side of the world's tallest building, lumbered with a pair of malfunctioning Spider-Man gloves. As a director, Bird has the ability to conjure up a vivid sense of bullet-sweating anxiety whilst still working within a broad, blockbuster framework. The action is his films does not feel handed off or impersonal and is, therefore, the opposite of punctuation. These characters are baptised by motion. Stuck in increasingly implausible situations, they have to think their way around the problem and stress their bodies to accomplish their tasks.
Bird and screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec know that it's a lot easier to put yourself in the place of a man cooking inside a computer than it is to connect yourself with an invulnerable, psychically domineering gunfighter. Ghost Protocol is the first Mission: Impossible then, since Brian De Palma's opening salvo, that really revels in the actual process and planning required to place these spies in dangerous situations. Since Ethan Hunt and his crew are super duper disavowed for this instalment they're saddled with finite, malfunctioning equipment that forces them (not to mention the film itself) to construct intrigue around the bullishness inherent to genuine skill rather than an expensive or fantastical prop. Since there is no end to his talents, Bird also helps Cruise rejuvenate his star persona in a way that accounts for all of his perceived, sofa-stomping craziness. This Hunt is brilliant but unhinged, an intense and lofty presence with suicidal programming.
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