Mission Impossible 3
Director: J.J. Abrams
With: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Runtime: 126 min
The Oscars are done and dusted, and Hollywood is back to doing what it does best. This year promises a bumper crop: Superman Returns, X-men: The Last Stand, Poseidon, The Da Vinci Code, even the ‘instant classic’ Snakes on a Plane. It seems fitting that the biggest of the lot, Mission: Impossible 3, should lead the way.
The plot is fairly standard: Cruise’s secret agent Ethan Hunt is forced to recover a priceless weapon referred to as ‘the Rabbit’s Foot’, (presumably a WMD) for a villainous arms dealer before his kidnapped wife is murdered. There are plot holes and contrivances, of course, but that’s more or less to be expected. The main attraction is the international action set-pieces. These are never disappointing, but still fail to deliver the excitement which should accompany them.
The main problem to point out (and it’s hard to miss) is Cruise. As important as it is to detach the artist from the art, it’s a struggle to ingore the nagging feeling that this is his party, and we’ve been graciously invited to watch. The sequence in which Cruise sprints down a busy Shanghai street, for instance, is impressive but it knocks out the timing of the scene, and eases the tension. This happens repeatedly, and it becomes just too tempting to make the jump into real life. He is the centre of his universe, and too often it’s possible to see the man overwhelming the character.
Though it goes against the grain for a film of this size, it is in behind the lead performance that the film shines. Philip Seymour Hoffman (unfortunately under-used) is hands-down the best thing going as an unrepentant psychopath. Simon Pegg’s performance as a nervous techie is noteworthy, but over far too soon, while Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup give credible efforts as Hunt’s office-bound superiors. The spies-in-the-field team of Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q are decent enough, as is Hunt’s wife (Michelle Monaghan), but the attempts to give the film emotional depth are mediocre at best, and former Alias director JJ Abrams seems happy enough to resort to stock characters and stilted sentiment over engaging character development.
That said, Mission: Impossible 3 provides enough excitement to fill its two-hour runtime, and there are plenty of twists in the plot, though at times it seems weighed down by its star. It is perfectly passable as a summer blockbuster, but movie fans will have hoped for more.
Reviewed by Dave Coates
