Mission: Impossible 3 Review

by samseescinema (sammeriam AT comcast DOT net)
May 5th, 2006

Mission: Impossible 3
reviewed by Sam Osborn of www.samseescinema.com

rating: 3 out of 4

Director: J.J. Abrams
Cast: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Monaghan Screenplay: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, J.J. Abrams
MPAA Classification: PG-13

With the third installment of the Mission: Impossible movie franchise, Ethan Hunt is getting back to roots. Not only is he trying to make a marriage work while pumping bullets into baddies with the IMF, but he's also hung up his black belt in karate. What I mean is that John Woo is obviously not at the helm of M:I 3. This time we have J.J. Abrams, whose legacy has been built solely on a pristine record with network television; most notably with his creation of the shows "Felicity", "Alias", and "Lost". With M:I 3, Mr. Hunt gets back to Gadgetry, the most glorious of pastimes for any spy worth his marbles. And the film finds its feet with this stratagem, managing to find invention within otherwise generic gunplay sequences by eliminating the bullets from the equation and, instead, substituting technological acrobatics. All you action purists need not worry, however; all the elements of the goofball genre are still here. They're just nicely tweaked by the script and fueled by the countless zeroes in the budget.

The best part about big budget franchises is that producers can nail down big budget stars. The casting is great here, managing to capitalize on Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar win while walking off the scandal burns Tom Cruise now nurses in the shadows. As his lover, we get the quickly rising and stubbornly gorgeous Michelle Monaghan. As for his team, Ving Rhames returns without fault, Match Point's Jonathan Rhys-Meyers fills in the young, freakishly bright-eyed, hipster role, and Bahaar Soomekh fills in as an oddly unremarkable tough girl. Laurence Fishburne also makes a well appreciated appearance, following up last week's performance in Akeelah and the Bee. Altogether, the cast is a superbly whittled-down bunch that, despite their mostly trivial roles, manage to leave dents in the film's memory.

The story is a kind and refreshing avoidance of action film pitfalls. One of my fellow viewers was ingenious in pointing out that the device Ethan is charged to retrieve is never fully explained. It's called, quite vaguely, the Rabbit's Foot. Beyond that, we're all in the dark. What we do know, however, is that a front runner of the black market, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is trying to acquire this device and the U.S. Government has asked IMF to track it down. But first Ethan must find Lindsey Ferris (Keri Russell), whose been captured by Davian's crew and held hostage in Berlin. If this all seems out of order, point the finger at Mr. Abrams. Taking a page from the Pilot episode of Alias, Abrams opens the film at the end, if you will, with Ethan in chains, watching as Davian holds a pistol to his wife's head. And if Ethan's got a headache, it's because Davian claims he's implanted an explosive there. When there are explosives lodged in a spy's head, we immediately know we're either in a Charlie's Angels film, another iteration of James Bond, or a Mission: Impossible flick. Luckily, this is Mission: Impossible.

Getting back to the avoidance of pits, M:I 3 manages to stay true to its title without overstepping its boundaries. Granted, its boundaries are in severe contradiction to the laws of physics, they at least obey the laws of not annoying the audience. John Woo took the Mission: Impossible universe away from spy-work and leaned dangerously close to dabbling in a kind of Kung-Fu Hustle. The film worked in its way, but didn't manage to avoid a long-haired villain with a foreign accent. Filling in as Evil this time is Mr. Hoffman. He virtually does nothing, and it works brilliantly. Even when hanging by a string of cloth thousands of feet in the sky, he manages to slur out a cold threat to our hero. And as for the action scenes, M:I 3 rarely resorts to incoherent muzzle flashes to satisfy the action itch. The excitement is instead channeled into slickly organized infiltrations, rescues, and high-flying acrobatics. Ethan, at one point, must swing on a rope across two Shanghai skyscrapers, land on a roof, slide down its face while gunning down guards, and catch himself before he tumbles off into oblivion. And that's nothing to the ingenious of infiltrating the Vatican. Abrams leaves room for an ear-smashing helicopter/missile drone/dark ops soldiers versus Ethan hunt sequence, however, not forgetting to tap the palette for straight up gunplay.
M:I 3 is easily the best of the franchise thus far. Its villain, its hero and its girl are separately beautiful, buff, and cunning (I'll leave it to you to connect the dots on those descriptors). The story's twisty enough to keep us involved while it jets us around the globe to D.C. Shanghai, Vatican City, and Berlin. And the action, which is the deal-breaker for this genre, is classy, slick, and inventive. It looks as though Mr. Abrams has a career in film ahead of him, after all.

-www.samseescinema.com

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