If mindless henchman bumping, aged Scientology believers performing average stunts coupled with eyebrow raising twists are your cup of tea then you’re going to like this movie. Ethan Hunt is on a mission to prevent the rogue Syndicate programme from taking control of $2.5 Billion in untraceable funds around the globe.

Ethan Hunt is mostly invincible as he manages to survive a parachute jump with a huge bio-nuclear payload attached to his ass, drowning in a computer facility, a car crash across the length of a parking lot, a bike crash at highway speeds and jumping through glass windows all without a single visible scratch or mark. The movie’s dialogue also takes a jab at it saying that Ethan always manages to complete any given task. I think this is very well the reason why the series has devolved into a parody of itself. Given the well maintained irony of the title versus the actual stories, everybody knows Ethan is going to live and everything is going to be dandy.

The Opera scene is easily the best one in the movie and reminds me of the Curtains Down level in the Hitman - Blood Money game. It builds and relieves the tension fairly well and is reminiscent of the original MI movie plot.

Things like character development are thrown out of the window with undeveloped references such as The Bone Doctor, the half-assed bromance between Ethan and Benji and the romantic undercurrents between Ilsa and Ethan. Fortunately, the movie follows the no-forced-romance routine which makes the story bearable.

The movie characters take effort to mention that Ethan is a gambler relying mostly on luck. Although this is inherently true of any action movie protagonist, the other characters are always unaware or ignorant of it.

A few technically interesting points that I noticed about the movie’s premise are as follows:

• Ethan calls William from a phone booth and then ‘asks’ him to enable encryption. For the encryption to work successfully he’d have to have encryption equipment on both sides of the channel. Only one-way encryption would be pointless here.
• Water cooling generally does not involve huge water tanks with moving machinery inside it. Submerging complete systems in water is expensive, failure prone and not used; especially for the storage of security profiles. Actual water cooled systems use water to cool copper plating which is in thermal contact with the heated equipment.
• Ethan doesn’t close the lid of the security profile on his way out. Any non-trivial water submerged system would require proper closing of all ports before resuming normal operation and accepting the new profile. The indicative color of the socket also does not change back to the normal ‘blue’.
• Gait recognition as a security measure makes an appearance in order to make the Moroccan facility look state-of-the-art.
• Masks make a return as important tools used to get into places otherwise inaccessible to agents. The quality and speed of mask manufacturing in the movie is directly tied to improving CGI technology, increasing movie budgets and script writer’s liberty.
• The bikes featured in the chase scenes are BMW S1000RR which feature asymmetric design. More details can be found in this YouTube video

The knife fight between Ilsa Faust and the Bone Doctor was a satsifying and well choreographed one. It is not often you see well matched opponents of opposite sexes fighting each other in movies.

Ilsa Faust’s shoes are mentioned twice in the movie. What’s up with that?

They’ll probably keep making Mission: Impossible movies as long as Tom Cruise keeps producing them.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (Average)