The Terrorists Have Probably Already Won, But At Least Our Side Is HOT (Eye Candy)

Two things inspired this post:

(c). I saw the movie Mission Impossible IV: Don't Call It IV, Call It "Ghost Protocol" Because Otherwise It'll Sound Like A Junky Sequel Instead Of All Classy Like All Those James Bond Movies And Even That Bourne Movie, They Didn't Use Numbers, Did They? What Are We, a Bunch of TV Producers?

(iii). I read, on The Editing Room, the fake abridged script for same,

and both me, after the movie, and The Editing Room, made the same point: aside from Ethan Tom Cruise Hunt, the IMF agents are amazingly bad at their job, which raises the question: how'd they get hired in the first place?

A bit of research (googling pictures of hot people while Sweetie's at yoga) answers that question, and so I give you The Impossibly Hot But Amazingly Incompetent Agents of the IMF:

Maggie Q

Why she was incompetent: Her character, Zhen, was given three jobs to do in the movie: apply her makeup, spill wine on the bad guy, and pretend to seduce Tom Cruise posing as the bad guy to get him out of there "inconspicuously," because nothing says inconspicuous like leaving the Vatican with a clumsy, provocatively dressed hot woman.

Thandie Newton

Why she was incompetent: Supposedly a great cat burglar, she was foiled by Ethan Cruise despite the fact that he had about 24 hours to learn of her existence, her plan, and her whereabouts, then nearly drove her car off a cliff trying to avoid a job offer, then got busted reading a secret envelope by a bad guy because she put the envelope back in the wrong pocket, got fooled by the same bad guy into revealing the IMF plan, finally finishing her role as an incubator for a virus and needing to be rescued again by Ethan.

Paula Patton:

Why She Was Incompetent: Did you see the movie? She couldn't fight, blew the masquerade switcheroo, killed a person IMF needed as a hostage, failed to seduce a desperate guy who was actively trying to pick her up and finally got shot. I would make a better agent.

Ingeborga Dapkunaite

Why she was incompetent: Her job, in the first movie, was to watch a guy while she wore sunglasses. Seriously. And when she was done with that, she climbed into a car bomb and blew up.

Emmanuelle Beart

Why she was incompetent: In the very first film mission for the IMF team that showed up on screen, her role was "temporarily dead fake hooker," which required her to be temporarily dead, and a fake hooker, revived by Tom Hunt. On the next mission, her order to abort the mission was ignored by Ethan Tom Cruise, leading to her being apparently blown up (but she wasn't) as a set-up to seducing Ethan Hunt to get $10,000,000 from him, only she blows that (while helping Ethan succeed in all his other missions, thereby proving incompetent as a bad guy, too, finally getting shot by the bad guys because she told them not to shoot the good guys.

Keri Russell:

Why she was incompetent: Whatever she was supposed to be doing on her mission, it ended up with her tied to a chair and an explosive in her head and requiring a whole 'nother IMF team to rescue her, after which she couldn't stay awake long enough to even tell Ethan Cruise Hunt what was going on and had to be carried around like a sack of potatoes. Compare that to Tom Ethan Cruise, who, when the exact same thing happened to him, managed to beat up Philip Seymour Hoffman, teach his wife how to use a gun, set up a makeshift defibrillator, and stop his heart all before the charge went off.

Josh Holloway:

Why he was incompetent: Whatever mission he was supposed to be on, it didn't, apparently, require that he bother to learn the identity of one of the world's most notorious assassins, the woman who guns him down in an alley being unrecognizable to him even though other IMF agents, when they see her picture, instantly recognize her. Maybe he needed those reading glasses he found on the island more than he wanted to admit.