Kurt Loder on Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

The latest Mission: Impossible film, an enormous piece of product said to have consumed some $140-million on its way to an IMAX pleasure dome near you, is inevitably generic: a frenzied international chase sprinkled with squibbets of backstory and occasional intrusions of emotion. But as Kurt Loder reports, the script is cleverly structured, and director Brad Bird—the Pixar wonder kid lured away from Oscar-winning animation (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) for a first foray into live action—is resolute in keeping cliché pyrotechnics to a minimum: Most of the thrills here are provided by practical stunt work, for which star Tom Cruise must be given abundant props.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Guy Ritchie's second neo-Holmes movie, on the other hand, retains some of the virtues of the first—mainly the irrepressible Robert Downey Jr. in the title role and amiable Jude Law as his prickly colleague, Dr. Watson—but it also continues, and compounds, the shortcomings of that earlier film, chiefly the edited-to-death incoherence of Ritchie's action scenes, and his complete indifference to the elegant charm of Conan Doyle's famous "consulting detective." Sherlock Holmes in drag? Please.