4 outta 5

The start of Mission Impossible III, with Philip Seymour Hoffman taunting and threatening a simmering, raging Tom Cruise to an explosive conclusion, is one of those grab-you-by-the-throat  openers that  automatically commands your attention.  With an inventive script and direction by TV wonderkid J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost) MI:III manages to match that opening level of intensity for almost its entire running time.  As a kickoff movie to the summer spectacle season, this spy-thriller / insane action extravaganza is a pretty high watermark.  Its not really deep filmmaking, but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun. 

With all the couch jumping, placenta eating, Xenu-hating, and general crazy jibba-jabba coming from Tom Cruise over the past, well, year, one would believe that his career would need a swift, energetic kick.  (War of the Worlds, while awesome, was a lonnngggg time, celebrity PR-wise).  Mission Impossible III is just that kick.  Cruise does what he’s good at in this one – while he doesn’t exactly form “characters”, he’s skilled at making the audience believe and feel what he’s going through.  And, for all the recent weirdness, there is a reason that people have watched him for decades… he’s a fairly decent actor. 

Cruise’s squeeze, Michelle Monaghan is a non-entity. I kept thinking, “goddamn, she looks a lot like Liv Tyler”. As is often the fate of females in action movies, she’s just a damsel in distress waiting to be saved by her Scientologist.  Uhm, I mean, secret agent. 

Amongst the females, the IMF agents fare much better.  Keri Russell, the former Felicity star (Felicity was also a show that Abram’s produced), has a fairly good cameo as the in trouble IMF agent who gets the plot rolling.  But I found the final shots of her eventual fate to be somewhat unintentionally amusing.  A very sexy member of Cruise’s team is Maggie Q (nice stage name) as Zhen.  You only really notice her because she wears a barely-there, alluring red dress.  At the Vatican, no less. Sacrilicious!

As the main antagonist, newly Oscar minted Philip Seymour Hoffman brings a deadly kind of gravitas to his role.  Surprisingly, he really isn’t in the movie all that much. I’d swear that at least half of his lines in the movie have already been used in the trailers and TV advertisements.  But he manages to make the most of his limited screen time, creating a bad guy who is effective and projects an almost inhuman level of ruthlessness.  As far as baddies go in action movies, Hoffman is definitely a large step above the generic Euro-trash bad guys that usually dominate the action movie genre. 

The action setpieces are the film’s highlight, crammed with tons of “holy crap!” eye-popping moments. Abrams has an innovative take on action scenes, managing to twist generic action clichés around just enough to make things feel fresh.  There’s a raid on an abandoned warehouse that kicks off the action, which leads into a helicopter chase through a field of wind generators, complete with missiles flying left and right.  The raid on the Vatican recalls the original “team” vibe of the series. It’s nice to finally see a Mission Impossible movie actually show the IMF working together, instead of it being The Tom Cruise Action Show. 

The “money shot” repeated in the trailers and ads of Cruise being blown away from an explosion into a car (which shatters from the impact) looks freakin spectacular on screen.  Though it really doesn’t make much physical sense.  If Ethan Hunt really was thrown into a car with that amount of force, it would snap his spine like a twig and he’d spend the rest of the movie twitching on the ground and moaning, “My back, oh, God, my back…”

Bah, I quibble.  Logic has little or no place in this movie, which is fine by me.

If there is one drawback to Abrams’ direction is the extreme over usage of handheld camera.  Not that handheld is necessarily bad, but too much shaking around may work better on TV than on a giant screen.  And sometimes its so extreme, that you cannot see what is happening.  Abrams can frame and move the camera with an eye-popping level of slickness – his pilot episode of Lost also looked similarly flashy. Mission Impossible III is one surprisingly colour-drenched movie as well.  Just watch those opening five minutes, splattered with bright blood reds and gritty shadows, and you’ll know that cinematographer Dan Mindel (Domino) did an excellent job. 

There’s another thing that kind of bothered me, but it ventures into spoiler territory, so feel free to skip over this paragraph.  But I don’t think its much of a spoiler to say the bad guy gets his well-deserved comeuppance in the end.  But the comeuppance that befalls the bad guys is just … well, pretty frickin lame and random.  It really doesn’t deserve the level of twists that the movie has gleefully thrown at us the entire way.  By the time the final ten minutes roll around, things have gone on autopilot and you can tell that Abrams’ bag of tricks is empty.

But even if it peters out at the end, there is still a huge chunk of extraordinary bang for your buck stuff going on for the running time.  Throw in some strong performances and plot twists that’ll keep you interested, and you have some above-average   entertainment. As a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am way to kick off the summer season, Mission Impossible III fits the bill.