(via Pictures & Photos from Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - IMDb)

Finally, truth in advertising.

I walked out of Mission Impossible IV thinking they hadn’t just dropped the ball; They demolished the stadium. 

But then I came to IMDB and took a second look at the poster and I’ll be damned if they didn’t come through on every single promise in the tagline at the top. Allow me to explain.

“No Plan.”

Big check on that one. This film has no story. No beginning. No middle. No end. In other words, no arc. No overreaching theme or thread that ties everything up.

How could this be, you ask? Especially when it has a running time of over 2hrs. Look no further than your writers and producers. This film was brought to you by J.J. Abrahms and two of the staff writers from his TV show, Alias.

In case you weren’t sure, TV writing is wholly different from film writing. On TV, stories can go nowhere, drifting aimlessly for weeks until they have to come up with something to warrant another season of the show. There was no plan because there was no plan in the script. Scenes, yes. A story, no.

“No Backup.”

Cruise’s team offers little in the way of characters you may actually care about in these perilous situations. Jeremy Renner. Paula Patton. Simon Pegg. All good actors in their own right. God forbid they should show it. Especially Renner. Coming off of The Hurt Locker, his character in this plays more like a castrate.

Secondly, a protagonist is only as good as his antagonist. The villain is essential to the plot only in that if Tom Cruise is going to spend half the film’s running time actually running, he must be chasing someone. Can’t remember the character’s name nor the actor’s. I’ve had meals at Denny’s that left more of an impression.

“No Choice.”

Since the price tag of this movie is somewhere in the $200-$300 million range, Mr. Cruise and company has given moviegoers no choice but to see this drek because it’s the only thing playing and it’s playing every 15 minutes. It’s a ‘roadblock’; Another TV advertising term that refers to buying commercial time on every station at the same time so no matter what station you turn to, you are forced to watch the commercial. No choice, indeed.

So I was going to say how disappointed I was with this film, especially coming from Brad Bird. But I’ll be damned if they didn’t deliver exactly what they promised on the poster. 

Like the schlocky film distributor tells Ed Wood in Tim Burton’s great film, “Fuck the script. We got the poster!”