Mission Impossible 3 (2006)

 

Put Your Brain On “Cruise” Control and Enjoy the Explosions

 

 

          Who isn’t sick of hearing about Tom Cruise?  That’s the most impossible mission; turning on the TV without seeing something about Tom Cruise and his loveable daughter… *cough*… wife, Katie Holmes, and their loveable daughter, Suri (“Suri?”).  Cruise puts the “over” in over-the-top, over-hyped, and overrated, and he’s the epitome of the word overexposed.  Okay, I’ll give him his due; he was awesome in Collateral as the cool, precise hit man.  But he was overwhelmingly abysmal in War of the Worlds, a film where you wondered if he was protecting Dakota Fanning, or she was protecting him.  And oh, the Scientology; the leaping on the couch on “Oprah”; the pedophiliac love affair with Katie Holmes; the incessant, ubiquitous, interminable news about the baby. Tom Cruise has been decent in a lot of decent movies, yet you’re just so nauseas of hearing about him it makes you forget about all those good movies over the years. But the man does do one thing better than almost anybody; he sure makes the box office explode, and thus, we have the third Mission Impossible film (with definitely more possible).  And it’s everything you’d expect it to be, if nothing much else.

           

Neo-spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has left active action to train new IMF agents.  And he’s found love and wants to marry a nurse named Julia (Michelle Monaghan).  But when one of his protégés is kidnapped and murdered, Cruise is quickly pulled back into the game, where unfortunately Julia is pulled in with him.  Explosions, gliding across buildings, lots of running, and more big fiery banging explosions ensue.

 

This is 100% Tom Cruise’s movie.  It soars with him and it falls with him. Cruise here is, well… cruising.  He’s really neither good nor bad, he just is.  You couldn’t imagine this series without him, but is it really that much better with him (and his off-screen distratctions)?  There’s almost a plot here, Cruise like a good-guy gangster trying to leave the game, but unable to because the game is a part of him and he is a part of the game.  It’s an interesting, if not an overwhelmingly believable aspect of the film.

 

Most of the way, “MI:3” is very entertaining.  It builds surprisingly thick intensity, and there are some very tense, forceful scenes.  Plot twists abound, which is to be expected from the MI movies.  But there’s at least one too many plot curls (not to mention holes) here that hurt the film’s momentum late.

 

Besides Cruise, in the acting department series regular Ving Rhames returns, painfully.  Rhames is way too old and slow, and his appearance is almost as awkward as Jean Reno’s in the first film.  As Hunt’s love interest Michelle Monaghan is very pretty and caries a radiating sweetness and innocence.  We’re as clueless why she’s in love with Tom Cruise as we are with why Katie is, but she’s really cute nonetheless.  Monaghan is only 14 years younger than Cruise, whereas Katie’s 16 years younger, which maybe makes it a little less creepy.

           

The high point of the film is oddball Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain.  Hoffman is dynamic, bringing a titillating evilness and power to the screen.  Unfortunately, his character is sorely underdeveloped and only onscreen for a pitiful short few minutes.  You wonder if he spent more than a day shooting there’s so disappointing little of him, and you know absolutely nothing about his character. But when he is on the screen, he lights it up like a firecracker. “You don’t think I’ll do it?!?”

 

In the end MI3 is better than Woo’s second film, but not as good as De Palma’s first. It’s your typical summer big-budget blockbuster. It’s too long, but often entertaining, and be sure to buy some extra buttery popcorn, because this is the epitome of a “popcorn movie.” It’s not bad, but seeing a better movie sometime this summer is a mission that promises to be in no way impossible.

 

- Movie Review By G. Roger Priddy (5-13-06)