Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol, and I am very ashamed of myself.
It's very apparent from the first twenty minutes of the film onward that both franchise and star are getting old. (We didn't miss those creative camera angles, Mr. Cruise.) This could have been an opportunity to age gracefully and emerge as something new; Tom Cruise is a good actor, for all of his personal foibles.
However, Tom Cruise is also insane.
So what we have is an over the top mish-mash of Cruise refusing to admit that he's not thirty-five any longer, where the movie is trying to take itself deadly seriously one minute and then winking and giggling right along with you at how completely bullshit all of this the next. Sometimes it pulls it off, sometimes it doesn't. (The sleight of hand with the diamonds was nothing other than genuinely clever, however, and I liked the meta-awareness of how improbable those masks are by having them fuck up before they even got out of the gate.) Jeremy Renner's Brandt is the character who does most of the "Wait, no, really?" disbelief, in between his whip-arounds into being Jason Bourne, and he does it well and prettily. (I know it's just a quirk of biology, but the fact that Renner looks drunk all the time works well for him here.) We were seeing the movie after multiple drinks at dinner and with a burning need to giggle and forget some real-life seriousness for awhile, so it was probably unfortunate that we noticed Renner's incredibly flat ass, because the "He lost his ass in 'NAM!" jokes could not be stopped after that. If you watch the movie, Brandt's actual backstory is no less manpainy and ridiculous. But Jeremy Renner is just so pretty! And plays Brandt with an endearing nerdy sweetness even as he's pistol-whipping people and generally being a badass.
I've mentioned that Cruise is nuts, and he is, but I will give him credit for this moment of maturity: Hunt's relationship with the much younger Agent Jane Carter is entirely platonic, almost paternal. Since she's the requisite female hottie and the movie is built largely around Cruise refusing to admit that he's not a young man any longer, I was both surprised and impressed. Not only that, but the movie had charmed me so hard against my will that by the end, when we do get a glimpse of Hunt's actual love interest, I was rooting pretty hard for the movie to take a big dose of Fuckitol and do a Katie cameo.
Also, Carter is awesome enough that Josh Holloway gets fridged (yeah, sorry if you were planning on seeing the movie solely for him) so that she can have the burning revenge angst, is never without a pair of diamond earrings, and appears to live by a life motto of "When in doubt, kick the bitch out a window." I have a ridiculous crush on Agent Carter, IJS. EDIT: And now that I think about it, there weren't any overt male-gaze moments towards her, either.
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And then, I have to admit, the only new show that has actually pulled my interest and kept it is Person of Interest on CBS. No_Detective has a great pimp post here; I am not into Finch/Reese (or Finch at all, really--longstanding antipathy towards Michael Emerson), but she lays out the show's slow-burning charms in a really great way. It is very much a White Dude Manpain hour on the surface, and below the surface for the first couple of episodes, but the writers (and fandom, which I love) have been realizing that they have Taraji P. Henson on tap more and more. All three regulars are absolutely bringing their A-games while the writers are rising up to match until there's something happening there. Something worth getting its own tag, at least.
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