Recent review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows

Two sequels make this week’s top punctuation mark the colon, followed by the emdash. One’s terrific one’s grating. But which is which? Actually, let’s go ahead and spoil that. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is one of the best action films I’ve seen in a long time, and the best of a series that’s been pretty good all along. (Except for the disappointing second entry, which failed to deliver on the promise of letting John Woo loose with Hollywood’s most expensive toys.) One of the best animators around, Brad Bird, makes his live-action debut with this one. It’s animation’s loss, but I doubt anyone will be complaining after seeing this.

MI:4 features explosions galore. So does Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows but beyond that they have little in common. Bird directs action scenes with classical discipline. Holmes director Guy Ritchie just uses them as an excuse to try some cool-looking shit. I was surprised by how much I liked Ritchie’s first Holmes film, having not cared for his work in the past. But the charms of the first one, including Robert Downey Jr.’s eccentric performance, get lost here as the sensation-above-all Ritchie of old returns. So do the flat characterizations that made me check out on him after Snatch. “Oi! You think you’ve got a bad attitude?” every character seems on the verging of saying. “Wait until you see mine!”