But if you can suspend disbelief for a couple hours it is one heck of a ride, this fourth installment of the series, Mission Impossible—Ghost Protocol. Tom Cruise is a great action guy, cool as a cucumber, but vulnerable enough to almost make it believable. His partners in impossibility, Jeremy Renner, the special opps guy with a haunting secret; Simon Pegg, the Brit sidekick who lends some humor to the endeavor; and the beautiful Paula Patton, who provides a little feminine mystique, make a great team. I found myself enjoying the banter and the verbal give-and-take as they were literally doing the impossible.

The stunts and cinematography are spectacular. Cruise is famous for doing all his own stunts, and all you can do watching the movie is stare in incredulity; this multi-zillion dollar superstar actually jumps out of the tallest building in the world! So what if he had harnesses and cables (no parachute as was first insisted). This stunt and some others were shot in IMAX, which unfortunately I didn’t see, and it was supposedly vertigo-inducing in that medium.

Of course the good guys win in the end, which is as it should be, because the missions are never really impossible in movieland, are they?