I do enjoy my Netflix account. It allows me to see films that I was unwilling or hesitant to view in the theaters and MI: Ghost Protocol is a perfect example of this effect.

I really enjoyed the first MI film, skipped the second, and found the third one entertaining, but not solid enough to entice me to buy it or see it’s sequel when it was released.

Ghost Protocol is a difficult film to discuss because it seems to exit in its own unique genre space.

There are Espionage Films, such as Breach, Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. These films are usually more realistic, with shifting gray moralities, a dearth action scenes, and resolutions that usually turn on a test of wills or cunning. 

Then there are Spy Movies, such as The Bond franchise, The Bourne series, and the first Mission Impossible movie. These movie have a lot more action, the gadgets and science are usually just outside the range of the practical, the hero is an expert in a dazzlingly number of fields, and the climax of the story often twenty or minutes of chase, escape, and fighting with the entire world hanging in the balance.

For clarity’s sakes let’s bring in a third genre of films, The Superhero movie, such as Iron Man, Captain American, and the recent Batman trilogy. Depending on the film the level of unreality can be quite extreme in a superhero movie, but you generally have a clear cut good and evil morality, special effects start making the stunt men sit on the sidelines of the production, and even ‘normal’ people survive punishment that in reality would leave them dead and yet in these films the character continued fighting, quite energetically, after such abuse.

Missing Impossible: Ghost Protocol seems to exist in a space between the Spy movie and the superhero movie. If you played the old superhero RPG Villains and Vigilantes, ghost Protocol is about a team of Non-Powered Adventurers attempting to stop a madman from igniting global thermonuclear war. The technology expressed in ghost Protocol is clearly of a science fictional bent. Not merely pushing what is capable today, the gadgets and devices of Ghost Protocol are more at home in a near SF story. The characters withstand physical trauma that is lethal in the real world with little more than pulled muscles and limps. (One does not simply roll out of car traveling at a high rate of speed.)

What the filmmakers got right in Ghost Protocol is an understanding that, if the audience is in on the hero’s plans, then those plans cannot be allowed to survive intact. Drama is created when the plan goes awry and we have no idea how the heroes can still achieve their objective. This Ghost Protocol does in spades. Devices failed to function properly, targets don’t behave as you would expect or adhere to your neat timetables, and random events ensure that Murphy continues to rule supreme. This creates set piece after set pieces, where plans are smashed and we are rushing headlong with the characters as they try to stay one step ahead of total disaster.

I did enjoy watching the movie, though I had to suspend my science filters and let them play at being superhero, just, for the most part, without masks. If you can enjoy the movie depends on if you can suspend those same critical functions and just let it be itself