MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, starring Tom Cruise

Little boys of all ages will enjoy this odd little end-of-year film. There’s a big explosion, clever disguises, a girl with no personality but fairly large breasts, and a bumbling computer nerd on whom the peace of the world depends.

Speaking of Depends, isn’t this guy a bit too old for this sort of nonsense? I’m speaking of Mr. Cruise here, and I’m just wondering if a guy who is pushing the big five-oh should do many more of these sorts of gigs. To his credit, he doesn’t do much of it himself. Aside from rappelling down the World’s Tallest Building, running through a dust storm (good thing he has his goggles, what a coincidence, but I am reminded that he still could neither see nor, perhaps more importantly, breathe while running flat out during a dust storm), and duking it out in a parking garage with an even older guy, he mostly watches his team members, stands around looking (I’ll admit this) really fine, and runs. He runs here. He runs there. See Tom run.

The story is odd, and by odd I mean: what the heck? First they tell us that the IMF team is on “Ghost Protocol,” which means they have been officially disappeared and they will get no help from the US government—they’ll have to make it on their own, with no official acknowledgement, no plan, no back-up. The next minute, they board a boxcar in a Russian trainyard that is equipped with a retina-scanning lock. Inside the boxcar is a fully-equipped Op Center full of every neato spy gadget. Plus it’s all shiny. They get to Dubai from Moscow, then to India, a sort of travelogue not unlike Cars 2, but in Cars 2 the missiles are better and the Queen is in it.

The Queen is also in Johnny English Reborn, which is a spy movie with a bumbling hero, and here we have Simon Pegg, the funny man who gave us Scotty, and here gives us Benji, the guy who makes all the technical stuff work—like stopping people on elevators because we’re not ready for them yet, we have to bust out the 130th floor window, climb up the side of the building with magic sticky hands which we got out of the fully stocked boxcar during the time we were disavowed and ghosty. Benji also wears a blow-up fake arm and pants for a tear-off plastic mask in a “can I, huh, can I?” breathless manner. (He doesn’t get to.)

Okay, okay, the story! It goes like this: Ethan (Mr. Cruise) is in a Russian jail. He gets busted out to do a job, but I don’t remember what that job is, because suddenly, someone else is the bad guy who steals the launch codes for the Russians’ nukes and blows up the Kremlin. The Russians think Ethan did it. Good thing they have him handcuffed to a bed in a hospital after he gets blasted unconscious in the explosion. But wait! There’s a paperclip on his medical chart, and good thing, because next time they look for him, the bed’s empty, but the lock on the handcuffs is open, the dastardly paperclip dangling.

He’s a Man on a Ledge, but he jumps onto a passing bus. He was wearing only a pair of pants for this, so that we could admire his musculature, which we did. Happily, as he makes his way through the alleys of Moscow, he is able to grab clothes that fit him off the lines and a pair of just-right shoes off a street vendor’s table.

Now Tom Cruise and I have a lot in common. One of which is our age (I’m 18 months older), and another is the height thing, but to be kind, I’ll let that slide. But perhaps our differences are more striking. While I have been known to jump on the furniture (yes, recently), I have never rappelled down anything, never mind that scary Dubai building. Nor, I am forced to admit, can I just walk down random alleys and find things that fit me, so really, in a Me versus Him contest, he totally wins.

Here’s something annoying: at the beginning credits, we see that Brad Bird is one of the producers. I think to myself, “Isn’t he the guy who did The Incredibles?” Not certain, I lodge this little bit away to check later when I get home. Turns out, it’s not necessary to check. Kid you not, on Ethan’s ring we see this: A113. Then, a bit later, after he has his alley clothes and shoes, he calls his handler (I thought he had no handler, he’s disappeared, he’s unacknowledged, ghosted) on some phone he just picked up out of nowhere and says, “I need immediate extraction at code Alpha one-one-three.” Seriously? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you haven’t been watching your Pixar films closely.)

Anyway, that annoyed me. I was already confused, because I remembered the first MI as being exciting and tension filled, but this one was from the very beginning comic booky in a way I do not remember the first one being. Maybe I’m wrong and they’re all this dorky.

My confusion stemmed from the ridiculous-looking stick-on facial hair and the Russian General’s uniform-that-turns-inside-out-and-becomes-an-ordinary jacket. The ridiculous nonstop chatter of Benji, which I wouldn’t put up with from a child, let alone an undercover operative. The silly Get Smart gizmos. The bland girl.

Paula Patton, our leading lady, is lovely, but she plays the part without expression, without mystery, without personality. She does, however, have the ability to seduce a billionaire playboy by looking at him while eating a grape, and this is certainly remarkable. I don’t know any billionaires, so I don’t know if it’s that easy, but you’d think that a billionaire would have the presence of mind to at least have security cameras or perhaps (I’m just guessing) bodyguards, in case a strange woman he’s never seen before is after more than instant, forgettable sex.

She’s after the code for shutting down the satellite so the bad guy can’t launch a nuke at the United States, thereby (you know the drill) plunging the world into that thing we saw on War Games in the eighties—mutual annihilation of the Big Boys—and may I say when Matthew Broderick did this, I was actually scared (c’mon, Joshua, SHUT DOWN already!), but then again, I was in my twenties and I was often frightened. (Long story: I had things to be frightened of.)

I also kept thinking about the bad guy in Sum of All Fears—that scary Nazi-guy who says that Europe will never rise because with the Russians on one side and the Americans on the other—what is our hope other than getting them to annihilate each other and then we get our turn! Same thing here, only this bad guy’s idea is more evolutionary: every two or three million years, we need to start over just for kicks. To make us stronger.

Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right to blow everything up just to see what’s left, but I could be wrong here. And anyway, why would you want to blow yourself up? The bad guy doesn’t have an escape plan. He’s going down with the rest of us, and only (I presume) people who are fully off the grid, like blubber-eating Eskimos maybe, are going to start over, and I say, good for them. They certainly deserve a shot at the good life, and by good life, I mean non-frozen, with real things to eat, not just whale fat.

I think they got the timing wrong. I’m not an evolutionist, but I do know that no one thinks there have been humans on the planet for two or three million years—I think evolutionists everywhere agree that homosapiens appeared around…well, let’s just quote Wikipedia: “Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago.” So you see, Mr. Humanity-Needs-To-Start-Over-Every-Two-Million-Years was super wrong on his figures. He’s only one-tenth there. Probably, he’s just impatient. People should learn to wait their turn. (“Behavioral modernity”?!)

Well, try as we might, our team of disappeared, disavowed, non-acknolwedged undercover agents can’t get to the satellite in time to disable it, so the nuke is fired! At San Francisco!

Why San Fran? Did they have a sick Republican agenda, or did they randomly choose a non-military bastion of artsy civilians for no reason? Are they jealous we invented tie-dye and cannabis addiction?

(I was born in San Francisco, just so you know, so I’m thinking, pick another city, Buster!)

Weirdly, the bad guy who steals the Russians’ launch codes, goes to Dubai (Cruise and Co. follow him) to meet with a pretty assassin lady who killed one of our Agents in Moscow a little while back. (The trip to Dubai is apparently just so Mr. Cruise can do the scary on that super tall building. Oh, and for the dust-storm to blow through. And to avoid camels while driving. That is, the locale was chosen for the clever shots it afforded, not for any plot advancement, and I’m being kind when I say this.)

After the super-crazy meeting in Dubai (it includes the fake arm, the wild rappelling, a teacup full of diamonds, and a girl-fight), everyone goes to India for the denouement. (Again, there’s no reason why it should be India, except so we can go to an exotic location.) When I say everyone, I mean it—we meet up again with the people who think Ethan blew up the Kremlin. They’re still mad about the paperclip incident. The bad guy is also there—he’s going to transmit the launch codes from a local television station or something. Why did he come to India to do this? Are there no television stations in Moscow? No satellites overhead?

The Russians will never make it back to superpowerdom if their nukes can be deployed by any genius Swede who happens to steal the codes. In America we have to initiate “snapcount.” We have to go to Defcon Five. We have to verify identifications. We have to have John Ashcroft compose a song. In Russia, it’s easier, apparently. A bad guy can steal the codes and just transmit them to a Russian submarine somewhere in the world, presumably in the Pacific for proximity to San Francisco, and boom, off goes the nuke.

You’d think the codes would be changed periodically, especially if—I’m just guessing here—the Kremlin was bombed a few days before. I’m also thinking that if the Kremlin was bombed at the moment the American Secretary of State (or Defense, I’m not sure, he’s just called The Secretary) is in town, and said Secretary turns up shot to death in the Neva, someone somewhere is going to have the presence of mind to do a look-see on the code security just for fun.

Again, why Frisco? If you’re in the Pacific, and you wanted to start a war between the Russians and the Americans, why leave the Fleet alone? This has been considered before, and the correct answer is either that sweet little natural deep-water harbor on the south side of Oahu or, maybe—just a wild guess here—San Diego. The bad guy (sorry, can’t remember his name) has an IQ of 190, so they say, but any moron knows if they pick San Fran, the Republicans are going to say, Heck with it. Nancy Pelosi is from there, let it go.

In the end, Tom Cruise and another old man are literally punching each other out in a cool parking garage where the cars move around on little platforms reminiscent of the moving staircases at Hogwarts. They are fighting over a briefcase (the one with The Abort Button in Cyrillic characters inside). They batter each other brutally, the briefcase falls down onto other platforms. The bad guy loses. Tom mashes the abort button exactly one second before the Trans America tower is hit.

I have to say America’s defense budget is a giant waste if it only takes four or five fairly ordinary people with fancy gadgets to save the world from Global Thermonuclear War. Apparently no one else noticed the inbound nuke. By “no one else” I mean, oh, the United States Navy, for one. Also, NORAD didn’t notice the inbound, which is odd, because, as you know, they can track Santa Clause, and he’s not nearly as dangerous as a thermonuclear device, depending on your theology. Also, we have the odd nuclear sub ourselves patrolling around the Pacific Ocean for just such an emergency, so the Team needed only to put a call through to CINCPAC and all would have been well, without people having to drive off 100-foot parking platforms. Maybe they didn’t have his number.

In the end, everything’s tied off neat and tidy. The team gathers for a beer. They’re all offered a next mission “if they choose to accept it”—they have five seconds to decide, just a guess—and then, wildly, out of the blue, Ethan’s supposedly dead wife appears, very much alive, with another man, but her heart longs for Ethan. Alas for them, he’s chosen the CIA over her. Alas for me, I went to this movie.

(Everyone else loves this movie: 94% on the Tomato Meter. Fairly mild. Ordinary teenagers can see it. No little kids.)