By Roxana Hadadi

“Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” is supposedly a spy movie, but it’s not.

At some point, Tom Cruise sprinting through foreign cities after bad guys will get old, but it hasn’t yet. And so, here we go again! You get those evil terrorists, Ethan Hunt!

It’s easy to mock “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” because even though it’s actually kind of amazing, it suffers from the same kind of flaws all these kinds of thrillers do. Cars flip around way too often, a la “Transformers.” Evil Russians won’t let the West be free, like in the revamped James Bond movies with Daniel Craig. And why bother with a serious script when you can just have Cruise looking intense all the time, doing intense stuff, while everyone else around him also looks intense while also doing intense stuff?! Try saying that 10 times fast. I. Dare. You.

Now-super removed from the ‘60s and ‘70s TV series “Mission: Impossible” on which it was originally based, the film series began in 1996, with Impossible Missions Force spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) involved in a twisty series of betrayals and staged deaths, meeting up with international criminals and disavowed hackers to restore his name. “Mission: Impossible II” came four years later, with Hunt trying to stop a bio-chemical expert from unleashing a deadly virus on the world’s unsuspecting population. And then in 2006 director J.J. Abrams (of “Lost” fame and this summer’s “Super 8”) came on board for “Mission: Impossible III,” with Hunt retired from the IMF but pulled back in to stop an arms dealer, despite his upcoming wedding to Julia (Michelle Monaghan). At the end of that film, Hunt walks off into the distance with his wife, but come on. We all know that wasn’t the end.

But it’s a jarring beginning to “Ghost Protocol” when we see Hunt in a Russian prison, all blasé while playing with a rock in his cell — even when doors all around start opening, spilling criminals into the halls. Fistfights reign, naturally, but Hunt finally gets up, gets out and holds his own, showing us he can still smash and bash with the best of them. When he finds his way to agents Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), he wryly jokes about how it “must be pretty bad out here” if they need him back. And yeah, it is.

Here’s the deal: Crazy physics professor and Russian nuclear strategist Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) is bent on starting a nuclear war, because it will thin out the population and be like natural selection and then we’ll have peace, blah blah blah. It’s Hunt’s mission to stop him from getting the launch codes and some other information that will help him spark this grand scheme, but when Hendricks frames Hunt for blowing up the Kremlin, things get a little tricky. IMF is officially disbanded, the Russian police are after Hunt, and he has to take his team and the few supplies they have left to places as far-flung as Dubai and Mumbai, India, to stay on Hendricks’s tail.

Everyone on Hunt’s team has their own drama. Carter is looking for revenge against assassin Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux). Benji is pumped to be on a mission in the field, so much so that his quirky giddiness may just mess something up — “I’m, I’m on the computer,” he stammers when faced with the possibility of actually doing something violent. And new addition to the team William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), supposedly just an IMF desk analyst, may know more about the mission than he’s letting on.

At this point, “Mission: Impossible” movies are just about the action sequences, and “Ghost Protocol” excels so absurdly at them that it’s easy to overlook other mistakes — mainly choppy dialogue and brief character development — from director Brad Bird and writers André Nemec and Josh Appelbaum. There’s a careening fight scene in a rotating Mumbai parking garage, an exceedingly long (but wonderfully shot) foot chase through the sandstorm-swept streets of Dubai, and a fantastically done, overwhelmingly suspenseful sequence where Hunt climbs up the side of the world’s tallest skyscraper, 130 floors up, with nothing but a pair of New Balances, some man-capris and these gloves that help him stick to the windows. Whoever thought it up should get an appreciative hug every hour of every day for the rest of their lives.