Bird's films with and before Pixar (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) have a peculiar, screwball rhythm that sets him apart even in a field of streamlined, über-professional animation direction, and he's often thought to be one of the only "auteurs" in the community—at least in the United States. His direction of Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol works feverishly to acquire the same weightless kineticism as his past triumphs. Truth be told, there are moments when the movie comes teasingly close to attaining escape velocity: a prison riot is staged like a Preston Sturges free-for-all, a secret agent shoots down two goons while falling off a building, and—in what seems to be a running contest with himself, the sequence that has now become the series trademark, i.e. Tom Cruise performing a climbing stunt over a very steep drop—our hero scales the face of Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. For the most part, disappointingly, the movie often feels sluggish and secondhand, as if there were really nothing Hunt and his team could do, no scrapes they could miracle their way out of, that could truly wow anyone, anywhere, anymore.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol | Film Review | Slant Magazine