I usually include the most widely promoted movie poster when I do a review here. But for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, I’m using the one that best communicates how unsurprising Paula Patton’s role is in the film. Unless you can say any of these lines with a straight face, there is nothing here that will impress you in any way:
“She’s a team leader and one of her men got killed and he’s secretly in LOVE with her, which we learn from his poignant deathbed confession? Never saw that coming!”
“Once Tom Cruise‘s character shows up, she’ll never be a team leader again, because he’s so much better than anyone ever? Really?”
“The team ends up being 75% white guys? Seriously?”
“She ends up fighting the only other woman in the cast? That is so totally unexpected!”
“The only way to get the codes to stop the nuclear missile is to put her in a tight evening dress and have her seduce a rich criminal? That NEVER happens in movies!”
“Right before one of the critical mission events, she gets shot and a man has to do her job? Why would they write it that way?”
The film lost me in the first 10 minutes, when Patton’s character and Simon Pegg‘s character decided it was totally fine to let some Russian prisoners beat half a dozen guards to death in order to spring Cruise’s character from jail. I never found anything after that to change my mind.
(This film was not making the argument that incarcerated people need to rise up against he prison-industrial complex. I promise. Murder was just a convenient distraction for saving Tom Cruise.)
Am I glad that Paula Patton, as a woman of color, had some acting work in a movie? Sure. Does this film do anything for anyone that needed doing? No.
Typical. One star.
This post was originally published on Heroine Content, a feminist and anti-racist movie blog that ran from July 2006 to May 2012.