Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol vs The A-Team

Note: I have no idea how to punctuate this thing. Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, with two colons? A comma? Parenthesis? Is there supposed to be a 4 in there somewhere? Can we agree to just call it Ghost Protocol?

There’s a lot of wind blown about actors doing their own stunts, and it typically doesn’t go far towards impressing me. Sylvester Stallone getting all tan and pumped up to take a fake punch or machine gun some blanks doesn’t exactly carry much authenticity or grace, and in a movie, both those things are welcome. Once in a while, someone like Jason Statham will perform a fight or chase that showcases his abilities in a way that grabs my attention, but those moments are usually in the service of underwhelming movies. And then there’s Tom Cruise. Throughout Ghost Protocol, Cruise runs, leaps, dives, ducks, slides, climbs, flips, skims, punches and kicks with such skill and confidence, there’s never any question he’s up for each task assigned to his character, Ethan Hunt. Cruise has often been athletic on film, but I never credited him with more than being a jock or a daredevil in real life. I think it’s time to view the things Tom Cruise can do the way we would any other special actor skill. He’s gifted. If you substituted his physical stunts in Ghost Protocol with, say, dancing, then Tom Cruise would be Gene Kelly. If they were slapstick, he’d be Buster Keaton. Tom Cruise’s abilities, on full display in Ghost Protocol, aren’t just a result of physical training and stunt coordination; they’re directly connected to his talent. Make of this what you will: Oscars have been given for far less discipline and method acting than Tom Cruise exhibits in Ghost Protocol.

As the film opens, Ethan Hunt is being broken out of prison in Russia, by a new team. Simon Pegg is still on hand as the computer ace, and is joined by Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton. They break him out in a quick, exciting, funny sequence that portrays Hunt as a stubborn hotdogger out to change the plan as they go along. It plays like a nudge at Cruise’s previous serious movie heroes, as well as his public persona of the last few years. It’s nice to see the guy who rides a motorcycle on movie premiere red carpets rolling his eyes before diving into a fistfight. Like the James Bond series, The Mission: Impossible movies are always split up into a few related episodes. This time, they’re a trio of action scenes that are spectacular examples of how the techniques of special effects can add to the suspense when there’s no question of How’d they do that? It never occurred to me to wonder how anything happened in Ghost Protocol, because everything looked, to my jaded movie-watching eyes, as if it really happened. At one point near the end of the movie, a character falls through a parking garage, hitting his chest on a rail on the way down. I assume that actor died. The sequence that everyone’s talking about though, the one that sells the movie, is a mesmerizing trip up and down the tallest building in Dubai, from the outside. Of course Ethan’s the one who scales it, wearing goggles and a pair of gloves that grip and release as he climbs. CGI was obviously used, as were wires and stuntmen and probably helicopters and e-meters and what-have-you. I couldn’t find any of it. The camera hangs on Cruise as he climbs, swings, falls, catches, bangs and bounces along the windows of that building. No quick edits, no shaking, or blurring, or smashing takes together. Director Brad Bird (The Incredibles) has never directed live-action before, and it’s like no one explained the rules to him about what humans can and can’t do. Freed from that nonsense, he proceeds to make a witty, tense, thriller in which humans do all these things humans can’t do. A running joke in Ghost Protocol is that all the dependable Mission: Impossible tricks—lifelike masks, anti-gravity devices, surveillance equipment—fail, one after the other, requiring Ethan’s team to step up and do things the old fashioned way. Required to just bluff and tough their way through impossible situations, they thrive. Besides Cruise’s Hunt, Patton, Renner and Pegg all acquit themselves so well, I’m hoping there’s not a new team next time. I can’t say the same for The A-Team.

Unlike Mission: Impossible, The A-Team transitioned from TV to movies with its original team of characters in tact. So instead of a fresh take on a concept, we have actors playing dress-up as the originals. Even Charlie’s Angels didn’t pull that. The characters--Hannibal, Face, B.A., Murdoch—are each introduced with a graphic and credit, just to drive it home, like it would be too much work for us to hear the characters call each other by name. The dilemma the movie faces, and ignores, is that if it’s assumed the audience has such an attachment to the source material that they’d never accept new characters, then is it necessary to retell the A-team’s origin? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. By the time the plot of the movie kicks in, it’s half over. The special effects are handled in that modern advertising style, with quick cuts, multiple angle takes, shit turning crooked, slow motion, speeded up, and any other trickery to hide what is or isn’t happening. The A-Team was directed by Joe Carnahan, who made Narc almost ten years ago. That movie is practically a documentary compared to The A-Team. It’s like he was given a checklist of things that have to happen in The A-Team (B.A. hates to fly, Face gets the ladies, “I love it when a plan comes together” etc), and didn’t have time to put his own fingerprint anywhere on the movie. Obviously, it all looks really good, and it’s not like The A-Team isn’t fun at all, but I never got the impression that any of the actors could do any of the things their characters were doing, or that there was any true danger or consequences to any of the action sequences. I couldn’t find green screen anywhere in Ghost Protocol, but in A-Team, I couldn’t find anything else.

Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol: A-

The A-Team: C-