MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 asks the cinematic question, “Why wander away inconspicuously from the scene of the latest mission when you can speed away at full throttle on the Tiber River?” It’s a spy fantasy and the answers to questions like that, and there are lots of them throughout the needless running time of over two hours, are always “Because is looks so very cool”. That’s the idea, anyway. The execution, that’s another matter altogether.
In this installment, IMF super operative Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has retired from the field and into training new agents. He has also happily settling into a dull sort of suburban life with fiancée, Julia (Bridget Monaghan). She’s a doctor and she thinks he’s a traffic planner. Naturally, things are going much too smoothly for this state of affairs to last any length of movie time. Sure enough, during their engagement party (when else?) Ethan gets a call from the boys upstairs, or rather one (Billy Crudup), asking him for one more field ops mission. His star pupil (Kerri Russell) has fallen victim to a particularly nasty black-market arms dealer (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and rather than follow standard operating procedure by disavowing her as she languishes in Berlin, the IMF would like Ethan to get her back. There’s also something called “the rabbit’s foot” that serves as the story’s McGuffin, and the necessary damsel in distress when Julia becomes an unwitting pawn.
In short order, it’s bang bang, boom boom, crash crash with lots of racing around far-flung locales from Rome to Shanghai, wearing disguises and looking shifty while doing it. The problem is that there is never much in the way of energy, much less conviction, on the part of the people out there in the field dodging bullets, shrapnel, and other assorted debris and fallout. Cruise is a mannequin whose toothy grin is actually getting toothier, becoming less dazzling and more off-putting. It’s a toss-up which is more excruciating to witness, his tender moments with Monaghan, or his mangling of the Italian language during the Rome portion of the adventure. Fortunately, he spends a nice chunk time running, which he does with such gung-ho intensity that it is easily the best acting he does in the entire film.
Returning team member Ving Rhames does his den mother routine, but not quite as warmly as before. New team member Maggie Q is there to wear tall shoes and a red evening gown with strategic cut outs, while Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the other new kid, suffers from a part that is so underwritten that it might as well have been played by a hologram of the actor. Even Hoffman, who is as interesting an actor as there is working today, is little more than peevish and pink-faced, spluttering with all the vitriol of a candle stub about to go out. Meanwhile the explosions get insistently louder as the plot becomes more hackneyed and the heavy artillery of helicopters and fighter jets are brought into make things seem ever so much more interesting than they are. There is also much of the by now signature Cruise move of dropping from high places on the most improbable of tethers and stopping short just millimeters from the hard, unforgiving ground. It’s not as thrilling as it was the first time. Or the second. Or even what feels like the twentieth.
Yet, in even the most dreary of films, one can, if one tries very hard, find some bright spot and in MI:3 there are two. One is Laurence Fishburne as the head of the IMF. His is an irresistable charisma that exudes effortless power and the inklings of a complex mind, which, in this context, only serves to underscore what is so sorely lacking in the film’s lead. The other bright spot is Simon Pegg as the IMF’s uber-techie. Elfin-faced, he brings a delicious, barely contained, free-floating irritation, only slightly more self-contained than the one he showcased so exquisitely in SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Whenever they appear, which is not often enough, the screen lights up, as does the audience.
An audience asks so little of a film like MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 that it is doubly disappointing when it fails to deliver on even such low expectations. There’s more entertainment in any of the television episodes, not to mention less demonds on one’s time, and a lower ticket price.
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