Thanks, I Hate It: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

I don't understand what it's like to be a dung beetle. There must, you know, be some underlying structure that impels their simple neural nets to roll big balls of shit, but whatever that structure is it's so far outside my experience of existence as to be functionally indecipherable. To me, Brad Bird's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol embodies the mystery of the dung beetle's world. I recognize the work of some sort of complex process in that the film exists, but the end result appears to me to be an insect pushing feces up a hill.

The movie's a dud from start to finish, a tour de force of shopworn crap like a comedy relief hacker guy in a van (Simon Pegg at his absolute worst) and ominous somebodies giving orders over burner phones. There's a scene where Pegg's character operates a drone that's shot like an extremely boring episode of Battle Bots, and it defines much of the tone for Bird's command of action sequences. The entire thing has a very big boy action figure playtime vibe, but with none of the earnestness or unselfconscious wonder of childhood. It's dead and soulless, a paint-by-numbers action flick starring a slave-owning cultist who's only ever been good in cunty, ratlike roles.

Cruise as Ethan Hunt is so inert that you could balance a milk bottle on his head and never spill a drop. His much-touted insistence on doing his own stunts is, I suppose, impressive to a point, but the rest is cracking wise and half-assing bullshit lines about being a lone wolf or whatever. The plot, a runaround about stolen nuclear launch codes, dead wives, and Russian defectors, feels stale and does little to buoy the airless action. And what else is there? Jeremy Renner proving he should never be allowed to speak for longer than ten seconds? Tom Cruise climbing a very tall building?

In action, everything depends on the physicality of the performers, the realism of the sets, the tempo of the violence. Ghost Protocol bounces around aimlessly from a prison break to a car chase to a fistfight to a gunfight, excelling at none of them, shooting each one with the same washed out color palette and Loony Toons camera. Bird's other big credit is The Incredibles, a children's movie about genetic superiority and the will to power, and his turn at the helm of the somehow still chugging Mission Impossible franchise plays very much like a cartoon with all the visual style and kinetic, hyper-real physicality sucked out of it. No one wants to see Wile E. Coyote talk about his dead fucking wife.