10 Movies That Peaked Too Soon

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is largely accepted to be the turning point for the spy franchise, where it transformed from a messy but entertaining action series into a phenomenally successful blockbuster IP.

And few who've seen the film will ever forget the instantly iconic sight of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) clinging gingerly to the side of the Burj Khalifa with nothing more than a scarcely functioning gadget-glove holding him in place.

But the whole Dubai sequence is thrillingly dynamic and takes up almost an entire half-hour of the movie, concluding just before the end of the second act.

And so, there's almost a solid hour of movie left which has to try and live up to this brilliance, which unsurprisingly it can't.

The subsequent Mumbai party sequence and Hunt's anti-climactic final battle with Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) in an automated car park feel totally standard fare compared to the more heightened thrills of the Dubai sequence.

Similarly the next film, Rogue Nation, blew its wad by having Tom Cruise clinging to a plane in its opening sequence, though the most recent effort, Fallout, seemed to have learned its lesson by having Cruise scale and pilot a helicopter for real only in its closing action scene.