Mission accomplished: Fourth film 'cruising' for success

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a terrific thriller with action sequences that function as a kind of action poetry. The best one has Tom Cruise hanging more than 100 stories up on the glass windows of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building. He has been equipped with gloves that cling when you slam them against the surface and release when you kinda curl them back.

Tricky enough in concept alone. But it has been claimed that Cruise "insisted on doing his stunts himself." Say what? The character Ethan Hunt is seen like a human fly clinging to glass thousands of feet in the air, and you're telling me we aren't looking at CGI? If that's really Tom Cruise, he seems like a suitable case for treatment.

If it is or isn't, the sequence is one of the most spellbinding stretches of film I've seen. In the way it's set up, photographed and edited, it provided me and my vertigo with scary fascination. The movie has other accomplished set pieces as well. Full review.