Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

The trait that links all four Mission: Impossible movies, each helmed by a different director of wildly differing stylistic sensibilities, is a certain amount of incomprehensibility. De Palma's original, which has aged better than any of its successors, is a smorgasbord of that filmmaker's love of audience manipulation, leftist politics, and metacinematic pranksterism. John Woo's sequel is, if anything, even crazier, replacing the peevish joke structure of De Palma's satire with pure, free-form abandon. J.J. Abrams' installment significantly pared down the twists and turns of the franchise's plots, making for the most conventionally satisfying of the series, yet the one that leaves me the coldest.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, the first live-action venture by animation superstar Brad Bird, is at once the most gargantuan, ridiculous of the movies and the most cogent entry, occasionally explained to the point of tedium. It makes for an uneven effort, one that comes alive every time Bird stages another setpiece and grinding to a halt when the holdover influence of Abrams' pedestrian hit weighs down every bit of dialogue. Happily, Bird, perhaps self-conscious about the expectations upon him, absolutely loads his movie with fantastically over-the-top sequences that make for perhaps the most popcorn-worthy of this franchise.

Opening with a delightfully bizarre sequence involving LOST's Josh Holloway, Ghost Protocol moves swiftly into a prison break in Russia that bails out our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Though a bit stiffly presented at first, this setpiece encapsulates the best of the series: it's crazy to the point of comedy (both for its physical properties and the input of a surveilling Simon Pegg as Benji) yet suitably impressive in its staging. Once out, Ethan and his rescuers—Benji and Jane Carter (Paula Patton)—receive a mission to infiltrate the Kremlin, but in true Mission: Impossible fashion, everything soon goes haywire.

Ghost Protocol reveals itself to be a nuclear thriller, a decidedly old-fashioned plot with decidedly old-fashioned villains. Perhaps the dilapidated subject matter explains the recurring imagery of malfunctioning technology. Old gear shorts and fizzles, while even new gadgets fail when needed most. The conceit suggests Bird's awareness that this franchise is outdated. This is not a new realization; De Palma structured the first of these movies as an investigation of what a Cold War spy series would mean in the absence of the USSR. And now that Bond himself has undergone a makeover to cut the waffle, Bird's too-clever-by-half trick doesn't have much bite, and he comes to rely on it to the point that it becomes a crutch. Nevertheless, the director's playfulness toward the genre is a refreshing bit of self-awareness, albeit an unsurprising one from the man who gave us a superhero movie as sly as The Incredibles.

With this gleeful energy, Bird comes the closest to the spirit of De Palma's film, and he even carries over a few other traits of the first of the franchise's entries. De Palma assembled one of the strangest casts for an ostensible mainstream cash-in on a TV show, with actors of multiple nationalities and ethnicities breaking up the all-American, all-white tone of so much blockbuster cinema. Likewise, Bird stacks his cast with an oddball assortment of actors, putting a visibly aged but still-virile Cruise with the youthful but out-of-shape Pegg (at 41, he still looks as if he has baby fat), Patton, Midnight in Paris' Lea Seydoux, Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor (magnificently OTT, as ever), Michael Nyqvist from the Swedish Millennium films, and more. Considering that Hollywood's casting hasn't gotten much more diverse since De Palma's poked fun at it, Bird's lineup is one of the film's most entertaining aspects.

But the real reason to come to these things is the ludicrous setpieces, and Bird doesn't disappoint. The sequence where Hunt must scale some floors 1000 feet in the air in the Burj Dubai in minutes as everything goes wildly awry. I don't know what it is about this franchise and its vertiginous centerpieces, but this bit blows away the previous stunts. Seen on an IMAX screen, the camera's looks to the ground below create a queasy sense of fear, while the framing of Hunt's climb made me wonder "How did they DO that?" incessantly. Yet even better—to these eyes, anyway—was the sequence shortly thereafter, where Ethan chases his target through a swirling sandstorm that reduces visibility to mere inches and howls over the soundtrack to equally block out the audio. The chase is one of the most thrilling in recent memory, a rust-colored maelstrom that borders on the surreal for its many reversals, lost leads and resumed pursuits, and a frame that is always changing yet strangely static, given the constant blur caused by the sand. There are other delights, from a whacky Kremlin break-in to an even odder party crashing in India, but nothing matches that wild chase through obliterated Dubai streets.

Where the film loses me is in the need to back up all these wonderfully quirky, nonsensical pieces into some kind of coherent whole. The opening bits of Holloway and the prison break are great for how immediate and unexplained they are, and the drawn-out truth behind both takes away from their spontaneity and silliness. Both De Palma and Woo made even their explanations confusing as hell (though I'm not sure Woo did so intentionally), but Bird clarifies in a way that advertises his skill for making coherent narratives, a valuable talent but one misapplied here. Bird also picks up the baton from Abrams re: the simplistic use of romance and shattered love as a motivation. The threat hanging over Ethan's wife moved the third film, and Carter's rage over her lover's death prompts many of her actions, reducing her character to borderline sexist motivation as a woman incapable of behaving like a professional, elite spy after suffering an emotional gut-punch. Likewise, Jeremy Renner's character teases out a mystery that loses all of its force when he spills the beans, and even when his own interpretation of events is later reversed, Renner's whole subplot fails to add anything and saddles the excellent actor with too much arbitrary baggage. This is Screenwriting 101, and it adds all-too-easy foundations for a franchise that, again, works best when it is convoluted beyond all get-out.

Nevertheless, Ghost Protocol is a hell of a good show for an animation director looking to break into live action, demonstrating that the recent trend of live-action filmmakers moving into animation is not a one-way bridge. Bird's familiarity with boundless framing gives his action pieces an exuberance that makes their absurdities infectiously engaging. I understand that the complaint that everything makes too much sense is an odd one, and one I wouldn't apply anywhere else, but I did still feel nagged by certain pieces of exposition that felt all too common after the extraordinary creativity Bird brought to the project. But that imagination overpowers even the tiniest of quibbles, and Ghost Protocol is easily the finest of the series since De Palma tried to kill the franchise before it started with the first.

The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Written as one extended climax, The Adventures of Tintin can be a draining experience, and one generally bereft of traditionally dramatic human elements. Yet the film bursts with such exuberance and imagination that even the Uncanny Valley limitations of motion-capture animation vanish in Brobdingnagian sequences so vast they make the special effect showcases of the Indiana Jones films look like the Super-8 pictures Spielberg made as a teenager. However well or poorly Spielberg's crack team of British writers capture the spirit of Hergé comics, Tintin is remarkable first and foremost for allowing one of cinema's biggest dreamers the opportunity to do anything he wants to do.

Spielberg's camera, already so active and eager in his live-action films, is here unmoored from any hindrance, be it spatial dimensions, production safety or physics itself. Every shot swoons, tilts, zooms and soars with elegance, creating such fluid motion that scenes routinely flow into each other through sudden inversions of  scale and setting. A massive setpiece shrinks into a puddle of water stepped in as the focus shifts, or a camelback trek through an endless desert forms on the back of a hand. Such segues make the film even more vertiginous, a dizzying, unabashed exercise in style over substance, one constantly in motion as the 3D communicate the unstoppable momentum, not unlike action lines in a comic. But when the artist in question is one of the medium's great stylists, sometimes it's more rewarding to simply sit back and be wowed.

Even the traditionally animated opening credits evoke a sense of goofy yet epic exploration, condensing the entire film to a shadowplay of whimsy and intrigue. The camera finally pulls back from this dynamic opening to reveal the 3D world, which instantly looks different from previous forays into mocap. Faces still have an awkward stiffness to them, but clear advances in the technology make for a far greater range of expressions and naturalness than the clumsy, even repellent animation that has obsessed Robert Zemeckis for whatever reason. Tintin himself (Jaime Bell) is the most porcelain-looking of all the characters, but his immediately apparent and unquenchable thirst for adventure makes his unblemished face endearing rather than creepy, and the grizzlier, more textured friends and foes he encounters on his journey make for artfully simple black/white designations of comic book heroes and less pure beings.

The animation in broader terms is simply stunning. The jam-packed mise-en-scène is never incoherent, and the detail of background characters is so good that some looked just like real people. Coordinating what Spielberg wanted took plenty of man-hours (he completed the physical filming for the motion capture by March 2009 and animation has taken up the intervening two years), but the results are breathtaking, complex yet ultimately lucid. The animation also benefits from the lighting consultation of Spielberg's regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, whose advice here benefits the film's gorgeous aesthetic as much as Roger Deakins' work on Wall•E made the animation not merely technically beautiful but artfully arranged. Kamiński helps lay out a noirish world in the first half that makes brilliant (in both senses of the word) use of blinding lights piercing fog and night to illuminate and disorient in equal measure. Street lamps, headlights, even muzzle flashes have a lyrical quality to them only enhanced by the danger they signify.

Combining several of the comic book stories into one narrative, Tintin moves at breakneck speed, instantly introducing a model of a ship that contains part of a guide to treasure and spiraling into a global trek by the end of the first act. The action moves at a similar pace, with even a minor apartment chase between a cat and Tintin's trusty dog Snowy working as a display of uninhibited camera movement. But soon such silly bits morph into gigantic, freewheeling pieces of constantly evolving mise-en-scène that layers utter pandemonium without the shot ever losing focus. To pick but one of several lengthy examples, a chase through the streets of Middle Eastern land "Bagghar" features Tintin, Snowy and their perpetually drunken but necessary ally Capt. Haddock (Andy Serkis, yet again putting in an expressive and multifaceted mocap performance) chasing after the stolen clues to sunken treasure. Spielberg piles on the absurdities, from a misfired rocket exploding a dam to a tank jutting into view, dragging along the building it unsuccessfully attempted to drive through. The action even splinters off in different directions, but Spielberg manages to track one character until he comes back in contact with another headed in an opposite direction, not cutting but merely arranging the progression of stunts until everything folds back to the other focal point.

It's tempting just to list all of the things that happen in any given sequence, though that would necessitate several thousand words to simply account for the objects in the frame. But the sheer giddiness of the construction is hard to shake off; after a decade and a half of more serious, dark films, Spielberg evokes open-mouthed, ecstatic wonderment for the first time since he panned up to show that brachiosaur in Jurassic Park. I went into Tintin looking forward to whatever the astonishing writing team of Edgar Wright, Steven Moffat and Joe Cornish came up with, but as much as I enjoyed their jokes—a scene with bumbling Interpol detectives Thompson and Thompson and a pickpocket achieves screwball-era verbal acrobatics—I kept coming back to Spielberg's unleashed id, where his visual creativity moves unbounded and his childlike exuberance and darker thoughts can coexist in ways they never quite managed to in, say, Hook. Through Haddock, the film touches upon the notions of failure, depression and redemption, and I noted that, after that absurd retooling of E.T., Spielberg no longer seems to have a problem with guns appearing in a film ostensibly for children (hell, Tintin himself gets off some rounds). But even those more grim facets cannot for one moment lessen the overwhelming delight of the picture, one of the purest expressions by one of the most resolutely uplifting of filmmakers.

Paul

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's screenplay for Paul reads like the sort of film their characters from Spaced would write. But then, apart from fictional flourishes to make the characters work in a sitcom, Tim Bisley and Mike Watt have always essentially been Pegg and Frost themselves. Some might point to this as a weakness of range, but it takes courage not only to play oneself on-screen but to put a friendship up for critique before the eyes of millions.

And if Paul accomplishes nothing else, it proves that Pegg and Frost share the finest chemistry in contemporary comedy. Married couples do not have the same energy and believability on-screen as these two dorky Englishmen; even when delivering the most obviously set-up punchline, their interplay makes every exchange fresh, natural and, nine times out of 10, hilarious.

Sadly, that may be indeed all that Paul manages. Originally scripted by the two friends to be something vaguely "dark," the finished product, directed by Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland), never finds its groove. Essentially a road trip movie that so happens to be set in Steven Spielberg's filmography, Paul uses its stoner take on E.T. to open up endless references of every geek hallmark of the last 40 years. After a prologue meant to recall Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the movie steps outside of referencing other films and moves the action to the San Diego Comic-Con, a real-life event constructed around nerd love for science fiction and pretty much all other genre entertainment.

Pegg and Frost play Graeme Willy and Clive Gollings, respectively, two laddish man-children from England using Comic-Con as the first stop on their tour of the southwest United States and its series of reported UFO sightings. As soon as they pass Area 51, however, they get more than they bargained for when a little green man calling himself Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) asks for their help.

The first half of Paul generally adheres to the style of comedy Mottola displayed in Superbad, mixing reference humor, gross-out gags and heat waves of awkward male introversion into a stream of madcap profanity. Paul turns out to be laid-back, sardonic and -- in classic British understatement on Pegg's part -- "a bit rude." Pegg and Frost delve so deeply into their reverence for science fiction that they emerge out the other side by suggesting such major pop culture icons as E.T. and Agent Mulder from The X-Files came from Paul's massive head, repositioning the usual canard of extraterrestrial beings bringing us scientific enlightenment to more esoteric, nerdy foci.

Yet for a creature hiding from government agents hellbent on splitting his skull open after metaphorically picking his brain for six decades, Paul does not seem overly concerned with capture, constantly walking around outside making loud chat in Rogen's booming growl and barking laugh. His attitude clashes with his frequent panic over discovery, and this disconnect marks the first (but not last) time the script sacrifices coherence and consistency for quick jokes.

Just as this looseness with character and narrative threatens to send this movie off the road, however, Kristen Wiig arrives as a Jesus-freak RV-park operator unwittingly lured into the trio's journey, to a smitten Graeme's delight and abject terror. Her Bible-thumping denial of alien life makes for a fresh few minutes of comedy, and some daring humor for American audiences not used to seeing Christians so openly mocked in a mainstream film; in the film's funniest exchange of dialogue, Paul lays out the particulars of evolution in machine-gun lines of withering condescension as Ruth shouts "Demon!" and sings "Amazing Grace." The boys even point out the riskiness of this humor when Paul warns against taking her along despite the necessity of doing so. "This is America," he moans. "Kidnapping a Christian is worse than harboring a fugitive!"

Wiig, perhaps the funniest actress working today, livens the film as the slowly progressing Ruth, her blend of repressed naïveté and budding connection to the world her father hid from her leads to numerous moments of awkward assimilation that would seem clichéd if Wiig were not so deft at playing them. However, too many of her lines play on the joke that she's just learned to curse and loves it, leading to repetitive and dull lines of Wiig throwing together random clusters of naughty words in hi-LAR-ious combinations for the rest of the film. Still, her presence considerably brightens the film, and Wiig's performance will make yet more fall in love with her and only strengthen the crushes the rest of us already have.

The entire cast excels, to be honest. Bill Hader, who, with Wiig, is easily the highlight of the current iteration of Saturday Night Live, gets the chance to show off some more of his underrated range. Known on SNL for his impersonations, Hader here continues to evolve after his wild performance in Adventureland, where he played the hair-trigger theme park owner who could snap at any instant. His hapless rookie agent is a full reversal from that role, but it allows Hader to show how well he handles more straightforward, even deadpan comedy after proving himself a gifted mimic and a manic performer. Paired with the always delightful Joe Lo Truglio, Hader creates an inverse of the buddy relationship between Pegg and Frost with a more classical comic duo setup of put-upon straight man and clowning buffoon. (Hader and Lo Truglio are the best secondary duo since Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody in last year's Cop Out, and they have the added burden of playing against the pure chemistry of Pegg and Frost's actual chemistry.)

Jason Bateman also gets to push his smarminess to the extreme as the head agent in pursuit of Paul. His Zoil does not exude intimidating force and knowledge so much as the ability to break others down through insults. He reminds me of that old Monty Python sketch about the gangster who tortured those who crossed him with sarcasm and bathos. Overseeing all is a not-so-mysterious female voice intent on bringing Paul's body back into the lab for testing; her climactic reveal opens the doors for references of the one major sci-fi franchise not brought up before the end.

Everyone here has such energy and charm that it's surprising how hollow the film ultimately feels. Part of this can be traced to the sudden gear shift in the second half that turns the raunchy drive through the flat, UFO-scanned Midwest into a near-bloodbath with a series of grisly deaths that are too grim to be funny yet too sudden and without context to carry any meaning. Pegg and Frost's original conception of the script purportedly incorporated more of the darker side seen in the last third into the whole film, but the lighter tone of the earlier slapstick makes the final version devastatingly uneven. Paul ultimately takes the key flaw of the Superbad-esque movie -- R-rated juvenilia and geekiness giving way suddenly to serious talks about friendship and one's future -- to its endpoint, careening so wildly between multiple shots of a CGI butt crack to horrifying deaths that one forgets the original point of the movie.

What makes this drastic transition all the more jarring is the degree to which Paul lets itself fall into familiar joke patterns, with some gags simply repeated without alteration throughout. Clive, who once won an award for his own sci-fi book, has struggled for years with the sequel, but he does have a cover drawn by Graeme*. That cover prominently displays an alien woman with three breasts, prompting outbursts of "Awesome!" whenever someone sees it. Paul gets off several boner jokes and Wiig's aforementioned madlib swearing grows wearisome nearly an hour before it finally stops. Paul contains so many clever and unique takes on overdone Star Wars references (even down to a country-bluegrass version of the Mos Eisley Cantina theme) that its eventually stagnation in these repeated jokes disappoints all the more. Clearly, these guys had it in them to keep writing fresh material.

These failings sadly undermine what might have been a slight but fiendishly fun ride from the best double act working today. It is indeed fun for a time, but by the end the references became too broad, too present for the sake of being references, and the repetition of jokes and gags made the film sag. Still, the performances are all fantastic, and Pegg and Frost are so good at what they do that they can turn a sappy expression of man love into something truly touching and make even the most tired dick-'n'-fart jokes funny by dint of their delivery and rapport. By the end, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that, for the first time, I saw Pegg and Frost playing about in their love of other people's movies without any examination or subversion of them. Maybe they need Wright's own writing ability to steer them straight, or at least his intuitive camera.

Still, I have to like a film that bluntly addresses the absurdity of fears of anal probing ("What can I possibly learn from an ass?!") and also lets its stars, cooped up in an RV for days on end, look like they've actually lived in an RV and not just stepped out of their makeup trailer. These touches almost make the film worth watching again, provided I stop about 2/3 of the way through. But I laughed, dear readers, and often, and I got all the Pegg and Frost I desired. That counts for something; just not as much as I'd have liked.


*I wondered throughout if Graeme's artistic ability was a nod to Pegg's role on Spaced or if Pegg simply likes the idea of being an illustrator for genre fiction.