IMF has been disbanded by presidential order after being blamed for a terrorist bombing that destroys the Kremlin. So, do Ethan Hunt and the remaining members of his now-rogue spy team sit around worrying about their 401(k)s?
Possibly they would in real life, but not in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,’’ a largely successful attempt to reboot the moribund franchise that turns out to be probably the most entertaining installment since Brian De Palma’s series opener from 15 years ago.
Tom Cruise’s Ethan, agreeably less preening than of yore, defies the unseen president’s Ghost Protocol shutdown order, launching an impossibly convoluted scheme to recapture stolen Russian nuclear launch codes before San Francisco becomes a pile of cinders. Or something like that.
PHOTOS: TOM CRUISE CLIMBS THE BURJ KHALIFA IN DUBAI
Under the witty direction of animation genius Brad Bird (“The Incredibles’’), “Ghost Protocol’’ acknowledges the incomprehensibility of “M:I’’ plots, which have always been shaky scaffoldings on which to hang the spectacular action sequences that audiences actually pay to see.
Bird has some real doozies up his sleeve, but first he disarms the audience with a title sequence — springing Ethan from a Russian prison — that affectionately kids the series, and even the ’60s TV show from whence it sprang.
This opening is so thoroughly over-the-top absurd that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Val Kilmer’s character from the spy spoof “Top Secret!’’ turned up as the quickly dispatched chief of IMF (alas, it’s an unbilled Tom Wilkinson).
The movie’s sense of humor extends to casting British funnyman Simon Pegg as the gadget-master of Ethan’s team, whose inventions have a way of failing at the most inopportune moments.
Like when Ethan is using his special gloves to climb what amounts to the world’s largest phallic symbol, a 160-story hotel in Dubai, to get to computer servers that somehow can only be accessed from outside the building.
This truly spectacular stunt — supposedly executed without the use of computer-generated imaging — is needed as part of a preposterous scheme to obtain those launch codes by having IMF staff simultaneously pose as the purchasers and sellers of said codes.
Well, I said it was convoluted.
Bird has also done a great job of staging an exciting chase in the mother of all Dubai dust storms.
When the action moves to Mumbai for reasons I can’t begin to explain, Ethan and one of the generic bad guys battle for possession of the codes on a series of revolving car elevators. Great fun!
The director, alas, can’t do much with a soggy coda that reaches for unearned poignancy by asking audiences to actually remember Ethan’s wife from the unfortunate “Mission: Impossible III.’’
The film also wastes the coiled intensity of Jeremy Renner, as the newest member of the IMF team with a none-too-compelling past. Bird does keep audiences guessing whether Renner is the only leading actor in Hollywood who’s even shorter than Cruise.
The team is rounded out by Paula Patton — amusingly jumping from her role as a lesbian schoolteacher in the Oscar-winning “Precious’’ — whose principal function here is to seduce an Indian mogul in pursuit of, you guessed it. Codes.
Except for a threat to Dumpster-dive without a shirt, Cruise, who’s pushing 50, plays a more mature iteration of Ethan.
But given the actor’s vanity and limited sense of humor, it would probably be expecting too much for him to more directly acknowledge his advancing age, the way Sean Connery did in his final James Bond film, made when he was not much older than Cruise.
Clocking in at well over two hours, “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol’’ overstays its welcome a bit, but delivers the goods where it really matters.