With public opinion trending toward the negative on Tom Cruise his work, as of late, has been highly overshadowed by what people think of him and his church.  This affected the overall earnings of Mission Impossible 3, which is in my opinion still the best of the franchise.  Whether or not this will hamper Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol remains to be seen, but I can say that the movie is easily better than one and two.

While you do not need to have seen any of the prior MI movies to enjoy this one, having seen this one makes me feel like I'm part of an in-joke at times.  This movie boasts a bigger overall goal than the previous films (your mission, should you choose to accept it is no less than save the entire world from nuclear war).  But it also boasts acceptance of an aging action star.  While it's never openly stated in dialogue, it's apparent that Cruise's Ethan Hunt is a bit more trepidations about some of the death defying stunts that are normally the hallmark of the character and comes across as much more vulnerable.  If the opening jailbreak sequence happened in earlier films Cruise would have fought his way past every criminal in the place and saved all the guards.  This Cruise is much more judicious in his ass-kickery and saves it for when he needs it.  Even the villain he gets paired against is older and far less of a combat oriented villain.

The supporting cast makes the movie feel whole and comic relief is once again provided by Simon Pegg but now with the addition of Jeremy Renner, who seems very capable of doing all of the spectacle stunts that Cruise would have done in the past.  The script itself is pretty clean and the movie only drags in the second half of the extensive Dubai sequence.  Cruise's performance is probably the best he's done in the series, mainly because Hunt feels a bit more human.

The worst special effect of the movie is the explosion at the Kremlin that you've seen in the previews.  The best is the first half of the Dubai sequence and it shows that it pays for actors to occasionally do their own stunts (and hang off the side of that hideously tall tower in Dubai) and not let a stuntman or CGI handle the heavy lifting.

While this movie doesn't center on an internal traitor or personal vendetta it does have a "this is a setup" feeling to it, even though the "setup" seems to stem from a coincidence rather than an elaborate plot to frame Ethan Hunt.  Outside of that I really enjoyed that this is the first MI where the team actually fails at a mission without some external force weighing down on them.

Overall, if you enjoy the series so far you'll enjoy this one.  Even if you haven't seen the others this is pretty much a standalone movie, though some cameos will be lost on you and it's a straight up action movie that doesn't mind poking fun at itself. 

I rate this movie a 2.67 out of 3.14