Are you sick to death of half baked action flicks torn from the pages of children’s comic books?  Are you tired of plots that have an implausible mish mash of monsters, giant machines from outer space and semi magical super heroes?  Well, action fans, Mission Impossible is the real deal.  The heroes are actual humans in whom we can believe, super only in their courage and determination.  The state of the art gadgets sometimes, at critical junctures, do not work properly and the bad guys are just that, guys who are bad, not machines or space aliens who do things we may not like.  The baddie in this one is an evil Swedish genius.  In this brave new world of global box office distribution, the bad guys tend to hail from one of the smaller movie markets.  The producers don’t want to tick off the citizens of a major market.

There is a prolonged sequence staged on the outside of the current world’s tallest building in Dubai that scared me silly.  I have no head for heights and I cringed at the danger the actors went through to make the scene.  It was so well produced that we in the theater thought that mega-star Tom Cruise might actually have put his life in danger. Silly to think that, but the verisimilitude of the shot really was that good.  This is $145 million very well spent.

Cruise and his band must stop the smart Swede from setting off WWIII.  He is convinced that the planet is overdue for a good nuclear cleansing and his mission is to move things along.  That gives motivation to the good guys for their heroic efforts.

Besides Cruise, who has definitely matured into a believable action star, the other team members are also quite good.  Jeremy Renner has the plum role as a brainy intelligence analyst who is thrown into the field.  We sense something might be amiss when the mild mannered analyst beats the living snot out of a bad guy.  We eventually find out the full story about this mystery but Renner does the subtleties very nicely.  You might remember him from the Boston heist film The Town and the Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker, both excellent films and both with memorable roles for Mr. Renner.  Englishman Simon Pegg plays the tech nerd for the crew.  He played the similar spot as Scotty, the engineer in the recent Star Trek film.  He came to our attention in the wonderful Sean of the Dead. As our teen reviewer in the Round Up said it is not a great Zombie film but rather “a great film with Zombies in it.”

Paula Patton is the fourth crew member.  She is big enough and athletic enough to make a much more believable secret operative than the usual smaller and also beautiful actresses in similar roles.   She makes us trust that she could whip any one of us five out of six times in a straight up fight.

This edition of Mission Impossible is rated PG-13 for plenty of violence, mostly very well choreographed fight scenes.  Director Brad Bird is known for his very successful animated films Ratatouille and The Incredibles.  They trusted him with over a hundred million dollars and he scored with a flawless, four saw blade, live people, action flick.

Fans of fantasy action films will anticipate next year’s John Carter of Mars.  Carter is a creation of Edger Rice Boroughs, the creator of Tarzan.  The trailer looks sumptuous.  See you there.