Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

They've done without the number this time, but anyone who cares knows that "Mission Impossible
— Ghost Protocol" is really "Mission Impossible 4," the fourth time Tom Cruise's intrepid Ethan
Hunt has taken on the evildoers of the world. And the fourth time a different adventurous director
has orchestrated the action.

In Ghost Protocol, the fourth installment of this 15-year-old franchise, Tom Cruise—short of hits
in the five years since the last film in the series—returns as Ethan Hunt, star agent of the
Impossible Mission Force, that U.S. government espionage squad dedicated to squashing colorful
malefactors in picturesque locations around the world. This time out, Hunt has a new team: brainy
-hot Agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton, smart choice); displaced intel analyst William Brandt
Renner, over-qualified for this sort of exercise); and, also back again, tech wiz and comic-relief
specialist Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). Their target: nuclear terrorist Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist,
of the Swedish Dragon Tattoo movies), whose rather Bondian ambition is to destroy the world and then
rebuild it into a new, improved, presumably more Hendricks-centric society.

Unsurprisingly, the marketing for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol has focused on the capital-b
Big. Moments like the Kremlin blowing up or Tom Cruise dangling off the world's tallest building on
the planet. We've seen gunfights, fistfights, explosions, fast cars, gorgeous women, and, of course,
Tom Cruise running really fast. The movie is also being released in IMAX, so all those huge moments
are going to be even bigger. It's kind of cool, then, that the new poster advertising Ghost Protocol's
IMAX release is an exercise in subtlety. IGN got its hands on the poster, and you can check it out below.

As for Downey, he seems already to have exhausted the possibilities of this jokey, wisecracking Holmes,
who’s little more than an ornament on a movie of such contemporary action-flick excess. The Holmes of
Conan Doyle’s stories would easily have figured that out. If only someone had thought to consult him.