Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) review

Installment four in the M:I movie franchise takes super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team to Moscow (and Dubai ... and India) where a rogue Swedish professor is determined to fire off a nuclear missile at the United States and kick off a Nuclear War (it's a motherfucker, don't you know). Although it wants to be a Bond replica, it simply isn't as smart as the best Bond movies - the best thing about spy movies is the ol' cloak and dagger sneakiness and intelligent plotting and character analysis, but this is techno-heavy (there's nothing a computer device can't do to move the story along) and devoted to moving from set-piece to set-piece without much thought of how it got there. It's good to know the not-young Cruise is doing his own stunts (he's earning that lofty paycheck) and it's certainly nice to see Lea Séydoux as an assassin (who gets kicked out a window), but that's all this amounts to: eye-candy. Sit back, don't think. Sponsored by BMW.