Mission Accomplished

Rating: * * * *

Brad Bird made his name with two brilliant animated films, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Mission Impossible 4 is his first live-action film, and it confirms that he is a first-rate director.

There are three sequences here – a break from a Russian prison, a hazardous climb up the tallest building in the world in Dubai, and a climactic fight in an automated multi-storey car park in Mumbai – that rank among the best not just of the year, but of all time.

The story, regrettably, is a routine affair that never departs from formula. Yet another madman is intent on bringing about a world war. He’s called Kurt Hendricks, and is played uninterestingly by Michael Nykvist.Apparently, this nutter’s belief is that only when the world has succumbed to nuclear annihilation will there be lasting peace. It’s a miracle this guy can get anyone to be his homicidal henchmen.

Hendricks blows up the Kremlin and pins the blame on America - more specifically agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Simon Pegg and Paula Patton).

After the death by explosion of their boss (Tom Wilkinson), Hunt and co know they are on their own as rogue agents though, as usual in this series, they never seem to suffer from any shortage of money or hi-tech gadgetry.

Major faults remain from the first three pictures. Ethan Hunt must be the blandest, most boring action hero in modern cinema.

The shape of the screenplay and cheesy attempts at flippant wisecracks are familiar from too many Bond films, and it’s curious to see a modern film still peddling a view of Russian-American relations that dates from the Cold War.

No one’s going to pretend this film is deep or meaningful but, at its best, it really is pretty awesome.

The Descendents

Rating * * *

Nothing gives me more pleasure than to welcome a new film by the gifted writer-director Alexander Payne, especially as The Descendants, his first movie since Sideways eight years ago, is so good, and in so many ways. His early pictures centred on the troubled lives, doubts and self-deceptions of middle-class people in his native Nebraska: the teacher played by Matthew Broderick getting into hot water of his own making inElection; the grumpy retired insurance executive (Jack Nicholson at his most engagingly misanthropic) coming to terms with the death of his wife in About Schmidt.

In Sideways, Payne moved west to California, where two uneasy former college friends (one divorced, one about to marry) embark on a disastrous wine-tasting vacation.

As far as the movies are concerned, Hawaii is a place for grim-faced pioneers such as Charlton Heston and Max von Sydow to found businesses and churches; for career soldiers stationed there to confront the Japanese who stab them in the back at Pearl Harbor; for mindless vacationers like Elvis to put on floral shirts, drape their necks with leis and dance on the beach, or for bronzed surfers in quest of the perfect wave.