The rest of what I have to say may come off as damning with faint praise, so let me say up front: I had a blast watching this movie.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a very fun, very stylish action flick that has that rarest of all elements, a story that’s fairly easy to follow. I’m not going to say the story makes any damn sense, but you always know what in the hell they’re doing and how it’s all going so terribly, awfully wrong.

Tom Cruise is back as…what the hell, you know the drill: secret government ops, betrayals, spies, sale of nuclear secrets. Amazingly beautiful on-location cinematography in Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai. Tom Cruise has three assistants: Simon Pegg (the nutty computer guy), Paula Patton (the cool, beautiful agent), and Jeremy Renner (who’s just an analyst…or is he?). The four of them all have things to do (hey, Cruise is pushing a still-in-very-good-shape 50, he can’t do everything) and together they take down the bad guys. Amazing stunts and action work — the scene on the Burj Khalifa is pretty amazing, even if you don’t see the film in IMAX (which we didn’t).

Every action movie — and I say this as someone who WUVS the genre — suffers from the “Wait…what?” problem. You know, you’ll be watching a movie and they’re doing X, Y, and Z and you find yourself saying, “Wait…what? Why are they doing that?” I’m not even talking about stuff like how the Mission Impossible team is stranded and alone in a train car in Moscow…and then suddenly they’re fitted with matching Armani suits and gliding into a hotel in Dubai. No, we can buy that — they had secret Visa cards or something. No, I’m talking about when something integral to the plot happens and you’re like, What the hell? The most famous example of this that comes to mind was when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep and asked novelist Philip Marlowe who had killed Owen, the chauffeur, and Marlowe admitted later, “They sent me a wire … asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either.”

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol moves so fast and gives you so many things to watch that eventually pay off (watch and learn, action movie makers, the overall story has to make sense, even if it isn’t realistic) that it’s not until the movie ends that you realize they had an awful lot of cool elements and scenes that don’t hold water at all. And you don’t care! Because it was cool! And it felt like it belonged! It wasn’t until we were walking out that we said, “So who were the guys with the guns on the quay in Moscow?” (Are packs of guys with AK-47s allowed to roam in Moscow like that? Not to mention…who shot the US Secretary? And…a US Secretary being assassinated right after the Kremlin got bombed wasn’t enough to tip off the Russians that, oh, I dunno, something major was going on?)

There’s other stuff like that — including an extended scene in which a highly trained operative turns out to be someone else…who wouldn’t be expected to have those mad skills. So…what what the point of having the highly trained operative involved in the first place? This particular plot point led Darin to say, “This movie is super villain cosplay.” If I hadn’t been driving the car — again, the nonsense of that plot point didn’t dawn on either of us until we were on the way home — I would have tweeted that line right then.

Like I said, it sounds like the movie was a mess, but this is actually very fun, very put-together stuff.

Other Notes:

• Am really glad they didn’t do the obvious thing with Jeremy Renner’s character.
• Am really glad that all of the IMF agents were competent — I was deeply afraid they were going to make Simon Pegg bad at doing anything except computers, and all that does is call into question the standards of the IMF organization.
• Tom Cruise needs the Russian cop (or whatever he was) there at the end because…?
• I kept really hoping that, in the final scene where Cruise was talking to Renner, that everything Tom told him was a complete lie. But that was probably one level too deep for this flick.

Anyhow. Not a bad way to spend two hours in a theater, and the cinematography is definitely grand scale stuff.

Hi Hollywood. I know you don’t care about me on so many levels—I’m over 25, I’m a woman, I’m married, I have children, I don’t like vampires whether sparkly or not—but Jesus, you aren’t even trying any more, are you?

It’s JULY. That is MIDSUMMER, for those of you who never leave the office and have no idea. SUMMER is peak movie season.

There is nothing for us to go see. I mean, I’m digging deep here, people. I am putting everything on the possibles list, and it’s still slim-to-no pickings. And Darin and I are almost willing to see anything.

Yes, I said almost. The Twilight movies are RIGHT OUT, okay?

(By the way, for anybody out there who still reads this blog and may have a small girl child of your acquaintance who may be interested in reading Twilight in the future…I beg you to read this book NOW, so you may know of what you speak when you trash this book as hard as it needs to be trashed. But that’s an entry for another day.)

What have Darin and I already seen this summer? Let’s see:

• Knight and Day: we saw this last week. It’s pretty silly, but it revels in its silliness—the montage where we only see little bits and pieces of how Tom Cruise gets Cameron Diaz out of a series of harrowing situations is hilarious. And while Tom always comes off as batshit-insane to me, he is absolutely the best thing in this movie: he’s funny as hell, and wow, is he comfortable being a movie star. Both Darin and I were really impressed by how amazingly charming Cruise was in this.
• The A-Team: Yes, we saw this. Best thing by far: Sharlto Copley as Murdock, the crazy helicopter pilot—man, that guy is good. Worst thing: there’s a whole plot point about Man of Violence BA Baracus becoming a Man of Peace…and we know that all is right with the world when he becomes a Man of Violence again. Hoo-yah! Also: hard as hell to tell what is going on in some scenes because of the action editing. Does anyone choreograph any more? Am I showing my age?
• Toy Story 3: Saw this with the kids. Thought it was great.
• Get Him To The Greek: Okay, I admit: I thought this was hilarious. It was completely stupid and yet: freaking hysterical. “Stroke the furry wall!”

Mind you, I had to look at a list of movies currently playing to remind me what I may have seen in the past few weeks (with the exception of Toy Story 3, which I remember seeing just fine).

Yes, we’ve skipped The Last Airbender, MacGruber, Prince of Persia, Shrek Forever After (the kids saw that one with their Grandpa), and Sex and the City 2.

We’re planning on seeing Despicable Me with the kids this weekend, so that’s out.

What are our current choices for a movie to go see on date night? Cyrus, I Am Love, and Predators.

Any of these may, in fact, turn out to be a great movie-going experience. But none of them appears to be a must-see movie-going experience. I have high hopes for the upcoming Inception, but one movie out of…how many?…that might turn out to be not completely mind-numbing and shallow.

Jesus, I don’t know where the love of movies is going to come from in the next generation. It’s dire out there, Hollywood, and frankly, I’m blaming you for it.

Oh yeah, and 3D? Kiss my ass.