There's an aspect of Mission: Impossible that wasn't fully realized or explored in the previous outings - humour. And that's exactly what director Brad Bird brought into this instalment!
With the inclusion of Simon Pegg's character Benji, almost everything was hilarious! Be it the prison hack or Kremlin infiltration sequences, it was so much fun! Only if Ving Rhames' Luther was present throughout to hike it all up a few notches, instead of appearing in a scene at the end alone! The part where Brandt (Jeremy Renner) refuses to jump on a wind turbine due to the worry of Benji's flawed technology was up rollicking!
Speaking of technology, the use of fancy gadgets was elaborate here. Door pin swallower, water droplet distractor, perspective based hallway illusion screen, cargo train hideout office, flash drive on panel TV, room number changer and eyes lens printer were uber cool! Chase and car crash beneath sandstorm plus brawl on automatic levelled parking to stop a nuclear missile from hitting Earth was intense! And we have yet to talk about the best sequence of them all!
The entire episode that took place in Burj Khalifa, Dubai was one of the premium golden moments in any Mission: Impossible features! Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) climbing on world's tallest building at the time with only adhesion gloves for support to access a server room, struggling to grasp himself onto the windshield when one of the gloves malfunctions, diving right onto target room by cutting off a handle wire before being held by his confidants from falling down 100 feet to his death and conning an assassin like the exact mirror happenings downstairs gave everyone an hour of panic attack! Tom Cruise is a different breed altogether! Not only is he stylish every time he does the swift apparel change, but the amount of sheer effort this guy gives for a picture of his is simply astounding!
Fundamentally, the film actually lacked a properly developed villain. Sure, we see him wanting to kill all livings on the planet, but there weren't clear motivations as to why he would want to do such a thing. As far as the writing's concerned, verbal expositions were obvious and certain arrangements of events or explanations in the screenplay could have been done better in order to avoid repetitions. Since the movie was travelling all over the globe Act after Act, you could kinda feel the unity was broken a bit. What's most shocking was, any special effects involving smoke, flame, sandstorm, explosions and water turned out to be pretty bad!