Coming five years after the well done and very enjoyable Mission: Impossible III (which seemed to set Ethan Hunt into the sunset married and happy) the fourth entry in the franchise brings back gravity defying action, car chases and Tom Cruise doing what he does best.
Running ahead of a huge explosion and throwing himself around the place like a twenty year old!
When the Kremlin itself is bombed and Hunt's IMF team is implicated, the entire organisation gets shut down and Ghost Protocol is enabled. Cut off, on their own and with less then the usual amount of equipment available to them they must get to the bottom of the events that have shut them down.
With a generally more humourous and lighter tone than even the previous Mission: Impossible films Ghost Protocol is perfectly made and excitingly done implausible action from start to finish. Working off a script by 'Alias' veterans Josh Applebaum and Andre Nemec and directed by animation champ Brad Bird in his live action debut the action is thick and fast and the possible plot holes even bigger!
The Burj Khalifa sequence is a standout that could give anyone vertigo but the film itself does have a couple of weak spots. There's some slightly cheap looking CGI in a couple of places and the 'villain' of the piece is both hardly present in the film and not up to much when he does appear. The film focuses more straightforwardly on the team and the various henchmen they deal with along the way.
Anyway, this is a definite crowd-pleaser that sees Cruise back in his wheelhouse after a rough couple of years. It's huge success as well seems also to ensure that a fifth film probably won't be too far away either.