About a third of the way through Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) puts an electronic suction cup on each of his hands and climbs up the side of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. And then one of the suction cups breaks. We get a sweeping, crystal-clear pan of Tom Cruise (no stunt double) clinging onto the side of the building as the music swells dramatically. It’s a terrific scene, by far the best in the movie, and for a brief moment the otherwise by-the-numbers action flick entertains delusions of something other than mediocrity.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. As a fast, jarring, occasionally intelligent thriller, Ghost Protocol is good but not quite excellent. The plot follows IMF (the Impossible Missions Force, not the International Monetary Fund) agents Ethan Hunt, Jane Carter (Paula Patton), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) as they race to save the world from an all-out, US-Russia nuclear war. Typical stuff. I haven’t seen the previous three Mission: Impossible films, so maybe the “twist” in this fourth installment didn’t phase me as much as it should have, but I found the storyline consistently bland and at times unengaging. The characters are little more than puppets, and, as expected, the only two women in the movie (Patton and Léa Seydoux, from Woody Allen’s excellent Midnight in Paris) talk little, fight often, and rarely show anything resembling emotion.

Then again, who actually watches these movies for character development or exposition? The fights, the stunts, and every scene involving the Burj Khalifa are all expertly choreographed and laughably unrealistic, just like they should be. Tom Cruise runs head-on into a dust storm, drives a car off of a parking garage, and survives a bombing, framed constantly by state-of-the-art special effects. Like the movie as a whole, these scenes are entertaining but, aside from a few aforementioned exceptions, entirely forgettable. James Cameron set the standard for purely visual entertainment in 2009 and Ghost Protocol makes a valiant if only sporadically successful attempt at challenging Avatar’s throne. Wait for the Burj Khalifa scenes to make their way onto YouTube (or just settle for the eye-popping behind-the-scenes footage) and, unless you really, really love action flicks or Tom Cruise, skip the movie.