As independently minded as movies come, Bellflower feels like the melding of a quirky Kevin Smith romcom from years past and a semi-deranged sexual exploit adventure crawling out of David Lynch’s subterranean imagination.  And to really seal the deal it’s all bolted together like a home made hot rod by Mad Max originator George Miller.  I can’t recall many films both as touchingly romantic and savagely barbaric as Bellflower.  It’s an experience destined to divide audiences right down the middle for years to come.  And something tells me gender will play a great part of that line and which side you’re on.

Written, directed and starring unknown commodity Evan Glodell, Bellflower starts as a sublime and adoringly amateurish romance of the young and carefree.  Glodell plays Woodrow, a harmless dude who spends his days paling around with semi-eccentric goofball best friend Adrian (Tyler Dawson).  The two spend their days dreaming of ruling a Mad Max world, driving around in a hell raising hot rod they plan to build as soon as they finish their homemade flame thrower.  It sounds juvenile, sitting around fantasizing about being Lord Humongous, but the two goofs would make a charming post apocalyptic pair.  A night out drinking introduces Woodrow to Milly (Jessie Wiseman), an adorable, gutsy, cupie doll of a girl who kicks his butt at a cricket eating contest.  By the next day they’re on a prolonged date to Texas, having a grand adventure full of surprise and falling in love.  The first half if Bellflower is simple in scope but highly stylized and very involving.  It may borderline on the amateurish on occasion but it’s a wholly convincing, winning experience. Unitl.

On their first date Millie casually hints at the damage she’ll eventually do to Woodrow and she’s not lying or exaggerating.   Halfway through Bellflower the story finishes with the honeymoon section and moves forward to an unspecified time down the road.  Perhaps no more than a few months, or even weeks after the two have hooked up.  Just enough for Woodrow to grow a scraggly beard.  For reasons we’re not made aware of we can see the shiny gloss of new love has faded and something is unraveling between Milly and Woodrow.  True to her word, Woodrow discovers Milly mid coitus with a friend and as his state of mind begins to fracture, so does the movie.  The lighthearted becomes grim, uplift is supplanted with savagery, romance becomes vengeance.  This affable story of young love turns more and more twisted at every beat. 

Glodell clearly has a very one sided perspective on romance.  His character is all sweetheart and good intention, a simple, slovenly charmer who loves flamethrowers.  The audience likes Milly just as much with her shitkicker pluck and feisty personality, but when the relationship sours, it’s all Milly’s fault.  We’re given very little motivation as to why she betrays Even, she just does it as if it’s compulsive on her part.  Her inevitable turn is hinted at to be sure, but some genuine shading and reason would’ve been more insightful.  As it is Milly simply turns rotten and drags Evan down with her.  The two characters complete their romantic implosion with savage acts against the other which strain credibility and threaten to set the movie aflame like one of the towering fireballs from Evan’s flamethrower.  Woodrow gets the apocalypse he’s so flippantly dreamed of and it’s nothing like he imagined.  He finally gets to be Lord Humongous, and it sucks.

Even if Glodell’s story turns you off he’s certainly a distinctive filmmaker with a eye for motion and vivid imagery.  Bellflower was made for a paltry $17,000 but has a shocking level of sophistication and innovative cinematography.  He’s also able to get credible performances from his semi-amateurish collection of actors and actresses.  Glodell and Wiseman had almost no professional acting experience before this.  There may be no Daniel Day Lewis on display but for a film which hinges so much on unknown actors, what he achieves is close to a miracle.

Bellflower starts as an expression of romantic love and ends on a bleak note of stark anti-romance.  It makes War of the Roses look like Love Story.  It’s characters wasted, demolished and destroyed their lives are summarily reduced to barbarism and hate.  It’s the kind of movie Sandra Bullock and Katherine Heigl would be forced to make should they lose a deal with the Devil and burn in Hell.  I can’t say something as simplistic as ‘I liked Bellflower‘, it’s more complicated than that.  It’s innovative and different and difficult to accept but it is what it is and has no qualms about being so.  If you find yourself drawn into it you may not be able to turn away, but it may burn your face off by the time its done.

Ten Word or Less Review - Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, wanting you to love him.

The above statement is the crux of the late night host self effacing, warts and all documentary which catalogs the comedian’s 2010 comedy tour across America.  The camera was turned on shortly after Conan’s much ballyhooed departure from The Tonight Show so that the geezer sanctioned Jay Leno could resume hosting duties after reneging on his promise to retire and mercifully go away.  Riddled with anger, anxiety, and unchanneled energy, and barred from being on TV for six months, O’Brian launches a tour across America to satisfy his desire to entertain with joke and song, and perhaps more importantly, to vent his grievances to adoring fans.

O’Brien is very direct about how he feels about the entire NBC/Leno/Tonight Show debacle.  His hostility at those responsible and the loss of his coveted show are dealt with through barbs and pointed jokes and you can sense the very deep, palpable resentment behind each zing.  He’s a funny guy who’s lost the one thing he dreamed about for years and he’s pissed about it.  His tour starts off as perhaps a type of catharsis.  A creative outlet that he’s never been afforded on the confines of TV.  But as the it grinds on we’re left observing what the experience is doing to O’Brien.  It’s making him a better entertainer, but is he becoming worse as a person?

This documentary affords the audience a chance to see O’Brien’s personality at its best and worst.  He’s a demanding perfectionist of himself and the those who work for him but his attitude towards underlings sometimes lapses into abusive and insulting.  He’s not completely unaware of this.  A belittling run of jokes at the expense of 30 Rock co-star Jack McBrayer feels particularly harsh, nasty and unprovoked.  McBrayar stands there and takes it, a look of ‘What the Hell did I do?’ all over his face.  Also casting a strange reflection on the man is his relationship with his audience.  O’Brien is an entertainer with an acute compulsive need to solicit approval from fans enthralled by his antics, even if it means physical exhaustion on his part and eventual resentment of the very fans he so desperately wants to love him.  As his tour winds down O’Brien looks aged, worn and weary, yet he still habitually throws himself at those who love him, only to become grated by further face time.

Can’t Stop is an engrossing documentary for O’Brien fans but works on a larger level as well.  It affords us a look at the type of personality/celebrity which craves attention an adoration on a massive scale.  O’Brien looks to have taken great strides to remain a grounded and approachable person, but the effects of celebrity are as vivid as the joksters nefarious, flaming red hair.  He’s a man who whole heartily wants our love and devotion at all cost, even if it possibly means driving himself to the brink of burnout in the process.  A few weeks after his grueling tour ended, Conan announced his return to TV where he beams at his audience brightly five nights a week.  Now approaching 20 years on TV I hope Conan knows when to stop.

Contagion

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark - Little, nasty monsters live in the basement of a gothic mansion and want to eat your child.  That’s pretty much the gist of this spooker from first time director Troy Nixey and over-talented writers Guillermo Del Toro and Matthew Robbins.  Nixey has a suspenseful style which is easy to appreciate and having Del Toro on as a producer and writer would seem like a great advantage, but the screenplay is the problem here.  Dark is hamstrung by cliched characters who behave in the stupid ways that people in films like this typically do.  Guy Pierce is stuck playing the skeptical parent whose daughter keeps telling him monsters are trying to get her while all the time he frets about architecture.  Katie Holmes is here trying to have a career.  She’s actually one of the few bright spots of the movie.  11 year old Bailee Madison doesn’t make for a very precocious lead either.  Having a sullen, downbeat kid who pops pills for anxiety disorders was a poor decision.  Del Toro is an incredibly imaginative filmmaker so seeing him churn out and approve of such rudimentary storytelling is kind of shocking.  Fans of horror flicks will get just enough mileage out of it, others not so much.

Warrior - How the Hell a movie set around the world of MMA could be this good is beyond me.  Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton play long separated brothers who find themselves falling back into the world of mixed martial arts fighting.   Hardy’s a sullen, pained vet of the Iraq war looking to take care of the family of a fallen comrade.  Edgerton is a physics teacher falling behind on an upside down mortgage, on top of which he’s been suspended from his job for moonlighting as a fighter.  Both actors turn in top tier work and if that weren’t enough, they’re almost overshadowed by a career best performance from Nick Nolte as their recovering alcoholic father.  Nolte has flirted with degrading self parody for a long time but if anyone doubted he still had the heart or ability to captivate a viewer, wash those thoughts away.  His is Oscar worthy work.  This movie is a real achievement, about regret and forgiveness, not just lugheads beating the piss out of each other.

Beginners

We gradually come to understand why Oliver fears commitment, how parents who are dysfunctional with themselves can seep their issues into the lives of their children and how it’s never too late to find happiness in ones life.  Veteran actor Christopher Plummer turns in one of the most cheerful and effervescent performances of his career.  Ewan McGregor, in a part which could’ve easily become redundantly glum, gives a lot of understanding and empathy to his distant and lonely young man.  Beginners is an emotionally honest film, never schmaltzy or false, and easy to consider as one of the best efforts of the year.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – Who? What? When? Why?  Unless you go into Tinker with an unrelenting, steel trap of a mind, or maybe you’ve already read the book, you’re likely going to be a little lost, a tad befuddled and possibly bewildered.  I’m no slouch when it comes to following difficult narratives but I felt like a blind man with no cane lead into a garden maze and given no more than a good luck pat on the head to get me going.  Tinker has crucial characters we never meet in person, minimal insight into several characters who are deemed important and an unforgiving flash forward, flash back structure which easily confuses the who’s and when’s of what we’re watching.  On one occasion I found myself wondering why I was watching the unfolding story of a character I thought to be clearly dead and gone from the picture.  In the end there is simply the oppressive sensation that a long, detailed and complicated story is being crammed in to a 2 hour plus run time.  A second viewing could perhaps shed some light on things and maybe make Tinker a winner for this viewer, there are a lot of excellent performances to admire, but confusion or no, performance or no, the most consistent feeling I had about it was ‘Why should I care about any of this?’  I couldn’t answer that question.

Point Blank – The style and momentum of a Bourne movie gets applied to this brisk kidnapping flick which moves like a well built rocket for 80+ minutes and then explodes before overstaying its welcome.  An mysterious criminal gets chased down by two dangerous pursuers until he’s hit by a motorcycle and sent to the ER unconscious.  The male nurse on duty has a very pregnant wife kidnapped by the criminals’ partner in crime and is forced to get the guy out of the hospital while he’s under police watch.  The cops involved are heinous a-holes, far more corrupt and deadly than the criminals he’s caught up with.  Things spiral out of control for the poor boob and his wife as a conspiracy unwinds and all kinds of mayhem reign down.  It’s fierce, intense and brisk and the screenplay keeps things on target, never wondering off or reaching too far.  Action fans will have a good time with this one.  It is French and it is subtitled.  Get over that and see it.

Degenerate movies are a dime a dozen and I’m savvy enough to skip most of them but curiosity gets the best of me on occasion.  The collage above represents the worst 8 movies of the year.  Melancholia doesn’t appear because I didn’t finish it.  Transformers 3 probably belongs on here but oh well.  Notable stinkers I didn’t see but may eventually: Conan the Barbarian, Breaking Dawn, The Hangover II, Dylan Dog, Pirates 4, Cowboys & Aliens, Season of the Witch, who knows what else.

Ten Word or Less Review: CGIndiana Jones.

After Indiana Jones and the Debacle of the Crystal Skull, as well as a couple of prolonged bouts of inaction, the world has been left to wonder if Steven Spielberg has anything left up his creative sleeve.  Is there another Jaws or E.T. in his future or just more time passing mediocrity?  Coming into the holiday season the bearded one had not one, but two new features released within days of each other.  On one hand is the award baiting War Horse which this viewer still hasn’t seen, but will.  In the other hand is the Indiana Jones-esque, CGI escapade The Adventures of Tin Tin, the first in what is supposed to be a new series of adventures for a very old character.

Tin Tin (Jamie Bell), a character little known in the U.S., is an intrepid reporter always looking for a story and finding high adventure with his trusty white terrier Snowy, a dog smarter than most people.  Out at the flea market one morning Tin Tin purchases an opulent model ship, The Unicorn, and no sooner has he bought it than trouble comes tapping on his shoulder.  A shady character by the name of Rackham (Daniel Craig) makes to steal the model ship and before Tin Tin, or the audience, is up to speed we’re on a treasure hunt.  Tin Tin buddies up with a drunkard ship captain by the name of Haddock (Andy Serkis), and the cast is complete for the kind of swift adventure Spielberg can knock about for good times when his wits are about him.

Tin Tin is Spielberg’s first 3D, all CGI feature and he shows a real love of the freedom and visual creativity the medium allows.  Tin Tin is alive at every second, swooshing around characters and action, providing an unending steam of insane hijinxs only motion capture CGI can create.  Spielberg’s team of visual artists have created a gorgeous template of rich textured landscapes, though they just barely avoid the pox of CGI character soullessness which handicaps too many creations of this type.  Tin Tins’ characters look very detailed and well rendered, but don’t quite emote so much as grimace a lot.  There’s a lushness to the cinematography which is impossible not to appreciate and Spielberg builds up dizzying action sequences by the gross that put his younger, sloppy contemporaries to shame.  A prolonged, unending chase through a Middle Eastern market that last one entire shot defines the term showstopper.  But….

As well executed and exhilarating as Tin Tin is in places, that’s all it ever is.  Tin Tin is a torrent of plot and narrative charging ahead at full speed at all times, stopping to breathe be damned.  Indiana Jones cleaned up, discussed what happened and kissed the girl, Tin Tin has no time.  And no girl either, just that precocious dog.  The movie plows ahead like a raging, CGI locomotive, the idea of tapping on the break even slightly a sacrilegious thought.  If Tin Tin let itself breathe just a little, and made its boy reporter a bit less forcefully earnest, the entire movie would elevate greatly.

Fast paced, 3D features seem like something Spielberg is ideally suited for, but his first run through with the tools and the talent needed to make a feature like this one is a mixed blessing.  He shows without doubt that he still has what it takes to exhilarate an audience.  Where Crystal Clunker was off kilter, cumbersome and poorly thought out, Tin Tin is crisply designed and breathless.  But while Skull ruined just about everything it touched, it had the benefit of allowing the audience to spend time with a character it cared about, even if the adventure he was on was retarded.  The Adventures of Tin Tin is a fine piece of adventure filmmaking, but someone should point out to Sir Steve that our hero needs to be more than a plucky protagonist who runs around with only a vague idea of what he’s after.  When your hero is constantly out charmed by his dog you’ve got a problem.

Ten Words or Less Review: Market Crash:  The Movie!

A typical disaster movie kicks off with a group of scientist suddenly discovering some Earth shattering piece of data which will forever change the world for the worse.  An asteroid is on a collision course for the planet, a mega storm is forming which will freeze us in a block of ice, the sun is about to bake us alive, penguins are mating at an unstoppable rate and threaten to over take humanity as the dominate species.  Portentous statements fly across the room, ominous projections are made about how many people will perish, politicians meet around big tables, the President speaks to the nation in a solemn tone, Bruce Willis flys off to space with a drill bit to save us!  This type of movie is thick with silliness and its tongue isn’t just in cheek, it stabs right through it.  The ironic thing is, scenarios like these aren’t always so far fetched. Margin Call is a small scale dramatization of 2008′s economic meltdown, a real life disaster of epic proportions.  Like a disaster movie, a smart person makes an alarming discovery, superiors are informed, calculated decisions are made as people talk around large tables, lives are then destroyed.  This time though there are no explosions, recognizable landmarks don’t come crashing down in an orgy of CGI mayhem and Bruce Willis and his drill bit have to stand by idly to wait and see if they have a job in the morning.

The economic downturn of 2008 is something the world is still living through now and will continue to struggle with for the foreseeable future.  Margin Call takes place at an unnamed investment firm shortly before the roof caves in.  On a morning where layoffs are taking place, a departing supervisor (Stanley Tucci) hands off a troubling piece of information to one of his unfired subordinates (Zachary Quinto) as he walks out the door. After looking through it, subordinate discovers that the economic model which the company’s fortunes have been resting upon is about to collapse, taking the entire company, and much more, with it.  It’s speculative drama but believable enough in style and execution to accept as a likely scenario someone witnessed in the boardrooms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 4 short years ago.  Men in expensive suits struggle with the ethical dilemmas of what they’ve done, are about to do, and whether or not they’ll survive the whirlwind of shit about to befall them all.

Though a viewer may expect some kind of grand vilification of some detestable individual who knew all along what was happening, no one in Margin Call is transparently evil or dripping with sinister intentions. It’s a movie with a realistic, sometimes impenetrable, slant to it.  It doesn’t expect the viewer to fully understand the nuts and bolts of high finance and it doesn’t bend over backward to make its comings and goings crystal clear.  Its characters are all portrayed as hard working men and women of various character.  Some of these people are better than others, others worse than some.  What’s here is a collection of complex people, presented warts and all.  Margin Call gives adequate glimpses into their lives and make them more than just lousy suits looking to rip off the American people.

Kevin Spacey puts out one of his best performances in years as a supervisor mortified by what’s transpired, but unable to do anything about it.  In the end he, like so many, is forced to make a reprehensible decision and let the chips fall where they may, all in the name of job necessity.  Zachary Quinto is the young and unfortunate discoverer of the fallacy which will set in motion world altering financial ramifications.  He’s a smart, young man suddenly faced with the real possibility he has no future.  Paul Bettany, Stanly Tucci, Simon Baker and Demi Moore (!?!) all turn in solid work as a group of business people who have no real answers and no life saving course of action to take.  They’re as trapped by circumstance as the people they’re about to ruin.  Jeremy Irons, as the company CEO, is the only character who comes off as unapologetically oily.  A craven opportunist, Irons makes his CEO knowingly scuzzy, but still believable and not over the top, even offering a birds eye view of events that viewers should listen closely too.

This is the third film in a year to tackle the same difficult subject.  The Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones vehicle The Comapny Men could be seen as a spiritual sequal to the events of this movie.  Margin Call detailing the events which lead to corporate implosion, while Company Men focuses on what happens after employees are pushed out the door. The documentary Inside Job stands as a engrossing, clear and clinical overview of what lead to the economic meltdown as a whole and where responsibilites should be placed.

When the stock market floundered and thousands of home owners found themselves up shit creek, their paddle not only gone but never had to begin with, the people wanted blood.  They wanted a name to curse, a face to spit on, someone to point at and say ‘THEM! They ruined it all for us!’  While there are scores of names to bandy about as culpable to various degrees, Margin Call makes the case that it’s more a fault of system than individual.  An entire economic boom was kicked off on a faulty premise and people, being opportunistic, jumped on board with reckless abandon to make a buck regardless of long term viability of what they were doing.  Warnings were ignored because dollars were being made.  Unlike the movies, there was no hero to jump in and save us, no noble hero to steer us past disaster.  Bruce Willis and his drill bit wound up out of work and on unemployment.  Margin Call methodically shows us that the entire world can be drastically set back because a few people with creative math skills go unchecked by wiser beings.

Ten Word or Less Review: Dragon tattoo girl is back, again.

The phenomenon status of Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy is now entering its fourth year and kicking things off is the long awaited American adaptation of the first part, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  An impressive array of talent has been assembled for this much anticipated endeavor.  The ever reliable David Fincher is behind the camera directing a cast which includes Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and the much touted Rooney Mara.  If you can handle one more trip through Larsons’ narrative of vengeance, disappearances and snow bound intrigue then Finchers’ adaptation should please you to know end.  If you’ve gotten worn out on Tattoo, it’s probably time to take up with something else.

Tattoo stars Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist, a Swedish journalist whose reputation has just been obliterated in court.  Blomkvist has been found guilty of slandering a crooked business tycoon in the pages of his investigative magazine, Millennium.  As he retreats to lick his professional wounds he’s approached to visit Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), a reclusive man with a 40 year mystery hanging over his aging head.  Four decades ago Henrik’s niece disappeared from the family island without trace.  Henrik challenges Blomkvist to look into the event, as well as his twisted family, and see what kind of new insight he can provide.  Hovering around all of this is Lisbeth Salander, a gothed out, tattooed, emotionally damaged and physically dangerous computer hacker/investigator who slowly becomes part of the pursuing of a serial killer whose been at large for the better part of 5 decades.

It was not going to be easy to bring Dragon Tattoo to an American multiplex with much sense of freshness or immediacy.  Being in the literary discussion for four years, as well as already being notably adapted to film in its native land, Dragon Tattoo has become the kind of property many people know at least something about without having even read a page of it.  It says something for Fincher’s adaptation that even though this will be the third variation on the same story, there’s still a lot to appreciate about the craft at hand.  Tattoo is a very watchable thriller of a very high order.  Fincher has one of the most meticulous eyes for editing and style of any director working today.  He brings his considerable amount of talent to Tattoo, and makes would could have been a rote experience an engrossing one.  Though he’s directed two other far superior thrillers within the the same genre before (Seven, Zodiac), Dragon Tattoo is nothing to scoff at.  He doesn’t shy away from the source materials edgier sequences but never does the film feel exploitative.  Though often cited as a great crafter of visuals, Fincher doesn’t always get his due for his work with actors.

Daniel Craig turns in good work as the intelligent but overwhelmed Blomkvist.  It can be difficult to swallow some leading men as less than capable, especially Craig.  He exudes such confidence and physical prowess as James Bond that buying him as an aging journalist may have backfired, but he gets away with it.  But the real show here is relative newcomer Rooney Mara.  What really elevates Larson’s potboiler out of the scores of mystery muck is his lead heroine.  Lisbeth Salander is the kind of raging, unstable protagonist not often found in the pages of a run-of-the-mill whodunit.  She endures humiliations at the hands of monsters quietly and replies with the kind of fierce retribution that gets an audiences blood going.  Mara embraces the physical exposure and emotional reclusiveness the part demands.  With so many young actresses out there unwilling to bare much of anything, it’s great to see one bare everything and feel completely believable as she does it.

While Fincher and his crew deserve no small amount of credit for delivering a very capable thriller they can’t get past certain obstacles inherent to the material.  Larson’s story is about as graceful as a three legged dog in some places.  The entire first half of Dragon Tattoo is basically made up of two competing movies which run side by side but have little to do with one another.  Our central characters don’t meet until the story is well into itself.  The mystery itself is also nothing to blow the doors off the genre either.  The Salander character has always been the overriding element which made this story something more, while the narrative driving it is serviceable boiler plate material.  It’s a whodunit.  A good whoduniot.  But not much more than a whodunit.

If The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is still fresh to you, or you still haven’t bothered to learn what all the fuss is about, Fincher’s adaptation is a great place to begin.  It’s a well crafted mystery with top tier talent contributing on all fronts.  Though two more novels lay in wait Fincher wisely gives the story a sense of conclusion which doesn’t mandate they ever be made.  I.E. you won’t be left hanging, forced to wait for a resolution in another movie.  In this day and age that is a rare commodity indeed.

Ten Word or Less Review: You can accept this mission.  It’s safe.

Reaching just its fourth installment in 15 years, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol shows that patience may be the better way to keep a franchise going.  This uneven series of films got off to a rocky start with not one, but two clunkers.  Brian DePalma’s first film is lethargic and boring.  John Woo’s M:I 2 was as dumb as it was successful, which is to say very.  Six years went by between parts 2 and 3 and in that time star Cruise took a public shalacking for being all kinds of nuts.  Jumped the couch!  It was a shame because JJ Abrams M:I III pumped life, energy and excitement into the series which it had always failed to find.  That invigorating spectacle looked to be the end of things, but with his last nugget of clout on the line, Mr. Cruise has gotten one more M:I movie to the screen.  Helmed by Pixar star Brad Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles), Ghost Protocol feels in line with the style and rhythms and Abrams third film, still a producer here, is fun, occasionally exhilarating, in enough places but doesn’t quite reach the razor sharp pace set by the last effort.

Ghost Protocol opens by reshuffling the deck from where we last left it.  We find Ethan Hunt (Cruise) locked away in a Russian jail for reasons which aren’t known.  His wife from the last film has vanished and is mentioned only cryptically.  Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne and everyone else not named Simon Pegg are also ejected.  Hunt’s cohorts (Pegg and Paula Patton) break him out as he’s needed for a new operation.  A Russian nutcase (Michael Nyquist) has eyes to steal codes for launching nuclear missiles.  His goal?  Make the world destroy itself.  That about sums it up.  If Ghost Protocol has one overbearing failing it is this.  This paper thin conceit for big budget action shenanigans is barely enough to hang a shirt on, much less a super sized action movie.  But despite the anemic idea driving it, Ghost Protocol squeezes out enough catchy antics to keep us just this side of happy.

Though irrevocably damaged by too many goofy inquiries into his whack life, the simple fact is that Tom Cruise can hold a camera’s attention and when coupled to a good action vehicle, he’s hard to make arguments against.  He’s played this character for 15 years and knows exactly what he’s doing at every second.  Where Ghost Protocol changes things up just a touch is that this is an actual team effort.  Previous Mission films typically turned into Cruise solo efforts as his supporting cast gradually flittered away with each progressive act.  As the first act ends Jeremy Renner shows up to become an unexpected and mysterious asset.  Renner works fine in supporting roles like his here and could be seen as future proofing the series on some level.  Simon Pegg works his irresistible charms as comic relief.  He actually gets to stay on for the duration of the story, and not just by phone.  Paula Patton also does some solid, sexy work as action sidekick babe.  If only the movie had a villain worth a damn.  Swedish actor Michael Nymqvist gets nothing interesting to do and nothing interesting to say.  He’s basically a MacGuffin on two legs.

Director Brad Bird is the wild card here.  Though it’s his first live action feature, as an animator he has not one but three beloved animation classics under his belt.  The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille are some of animations finest features, ever.  It isn’t easy for animation people to make their way into live action but Bird has been given an interesting test, to keep a fledgling franchise going as it comes into its fourth go around.  We all know that the fourth time is often not the charm for movie series.  Though handed a weak idea Bird works it for all he’s worth.    Shooting several sequences with IMAX cameras, Bird gives his action scenes pop but doesn’t over edit.  The extended second act sequence in Dubai, which involves Cruise hanging off the worlds’ largest building, playing a neat game of switcheroo in said tallest building and having a chase sequence in a sandstorm kicks things into a nice high gear.  The script doesn’t have the constant slam bang pacing that the last one did, we miss Philip Seymour Hoffman greatly, but as Ghost Protocol hits its stride just in time and starts to pay off just as you think it might turn into a wash out.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol gives fans of this series a nice dose of what they’ve enjoyed in the past.  It’s far more engaging than either parts one or two but is a step or two behind three.  Tom Cruise may be completely bonkers but that shouldn’t deter viewers who enjoy a spirited, big budget action romp from seeing this.  The IMAX sequences are stellar, Cruise is in good form and maybe we can even hold out hope that should a fifth part come about, we won’t have to live in fear of it.