Movie review: This 'Mission' is accomplished

What happens when you hire a guy who makes animated movies to direct a big-budget Hollywood action thriller?

In the case of Brad Bird, who previously directed The Iron Giant, and won Oscars for The Incredibles and Ratatouille, before being handed the reins of the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, you get something exuberant, elastic and eye-popping -- a movie that has little use for silly stuff like gravity.

Whether exploding the Kremlin in Moscow or racing through a dust storm in Dubai, Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol displays a cheeky, what-can-we-try-next? energy; it's the mostly purely enjoyable action movie since The Bourne Ultimatum.

And in tamping down the innate narcissism of star Tom Cruise -- while making plenty of room for a well-chosen supporting cast -- Bird strikes a balance that no previous "Mission: Impossible" movie did. Ghost Protocol is a genuine ensemble piece perfectly in tune with the 1960s television series on which the franchise is based.

The film opens with an mysterious assassination in Budapest, and then quickly turns its attention to a dank prison in Moscow, where Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has been incarcerated for murder. The prison break that follows -- overseen by two of Ethan's fellow IMF agents, the goofy computer expert Benji (Simon Pegg, reprising his role from the previous films) and the beautiful, but haunted Jane (Paula Patton) -- is both very funny and unexpectedly elegant.

As Ethan dances along a long, narrow corridor populated by marauding inmates, Bird seems to be restaging a (less violent) replay of the famed hammer sequence in Park Chan Wook's Oldboy (Cruise uses his fists in lieu of a hammer, but the rhythm and choreography are very much the same). It's one of many subtle, playful nods this movie makes to film history.

Written by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, Ghost Protocol corrects the gravest missteps of J.J. Abrams' Mission: Impossible III (2006), which turned needlessly, soullessly complicated, and gave Cruise no one especially compelling to play against. (Abrams is a producer of this new film.)

After Ethan and his team are blamed for blowing up the Kremlin (don't ask), they find themselves disavowed by the IMF. Unless they can travel to Dubai and pin the crime on a mysterious, nuclear war-obsessed figure named Hendriks (Michael Nyqvist), they will soon be declared rogue terrorists by the U.S. government.

All of this, of course, is merely pretext to a series of elaborate action sequences -- and it's here that Bird rises brilliantly to the challenge. The centerpiece of the film takes place mostly within the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world's tallest building, which at various points Ethan must race down vertically, and swing around horizontally.

Later on, Ethan chases a masked bad guy, in a car and on foot, through a blinding dust storm -- a bravura showpiece all the more impressive because it seems to rely so little on CGI. That Ethan sometimes comes off like the Road Runner in this film -- he runs and runs and runs and proves utterly indestructible, either by anvil or fireball -- feels all of a piece of the slightly cartoonlike, but never juvenile, spirit of things.

Other than the shaggy hair and an overeagerness to take off his shirt, Cruise dispenses with the movie-star affectations that sunk his last performance, in Knight and Day. And perhaps for the first time since 1988's Rain Man, the actor doesn't seem threatened by his co-stars.

Thirty minutes into the proceedings, Ghost Protocol introduces Brandt, an IMF analyst who gets drawn into the team, played by Jeremy Renner, from The Hurt Locker and The Town.

With his round face and hooded eyes, Renner is handsome in an unconventional way (not unlike Cruise, with his wolfish grin and jutting nose), and he's nearly 10 years younger than his co-star -- it seems a minor miracle that Cruise would even allow him on set.

But Cruise seems energized by the presence of such a gifted performer, and the two of them act out an alternately tense and affectionate portrait of partnership-in-blossom. It's the most human thing we have seen in any of the series' movies.

Techno-geeks take note: Bird filmed a number of sequences using IMAX cameras, and the film is opening Friday exclusively in 400 IMAX theaters nationwide, prior to its wide, traditional-format release next Wednesday.

The director doesn't employ the IMAX technology -- the camera-swooping-the-air photography; the bone-crunching sound -- with quite as much grace as Christopher Nolan did in The Dark Knight, but it nonetheless pays dividends. (When Cruise goes racing down that skyscraper, you feel like you are right alongside him.)

And if the movie perhaps goes on about 10 minutes too long, and the story turns slightly incomprehensible, the sheer energy of Bird's direction proves ecstatic, right up to and including the Rube Goldberg climax set at a car factory in Mumbai.

If you've ever wondered what a Pixar action sequence might look like translated into live action, wonder no more. Just sit back and enjoy.

Exclusive: IMAX edition showing at AMC Parks at Arlington, Colleyville Cinema Grille, AMC NorthPark in Dallas, Cinemark 17 in Dallas. Opens Wednesday in standard format in wide release.

Christopher Kelly is the Star-Telegram film critic, 817-390-7032

Twitter: ChrisKelly74