Movie Review: Mission Improbable III

When will the super-spies learn? The minute you have a wife, girlfriend, children, puppy, sportscar, or a goldfish, your nemesis will exploit it and seek your downfall by holding your beloved hostage.
You would’ve thought that any of the other spy/thriller movies where the hero’s lover is taken prisoner and held hostage at the hand of some diabolical and fantastic instrument of death would begin to be a roadmap to destruction for the spies who would follow later. But as smart as they are, they don’t seem to learn. This leaves the helpless movie-going audience no choice but to shout out advice to the characters on the screen hoping they’ll learn from others mistakes.

Interestingly enough, this movie managed to be just as entertaining as MI: II with only a fraction of the plot.

Thinking back, I can’t even remember what the plot was intended to be. Quite obviously, it was inconsequential. What was important was the elaborately conceived action sequences which effectively destroyed one-quarter’s worth of the gross national product. And then when they blew up all they could, they went to Shanghai and started chipping away at the Chinese industry.

The Premise: Tom Cruise revisits the ready-made American hero Ethan Hunt, star agent of the IMF (“Impossible Mission Force”? Does that really sound as retarded as it looks?) who is now training other agents to go out into the field. Apparently battling John Voigt inside the Chunnel just adds a few too many grey hairs. Know what I mean?
This time around Ethan has found a nurse that he wants to marry, so the early scenes are spent establishing Ethan’s relationship with her family at an engagement party. Ethan is eventually convinced to go back into the field to rescue an agent he trained. She dies in his arms (how poetic) and sends Ethan on a hunt to find the black market wizard Davien (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman before he got his Oscar) who is set to make a $800+ million dollar sale of something elusively called the “Rabbit Foot”, which we frustratingly never learn what it does. Since Ethan has disturbed Davien’s nefarious going-ons, Davien uses Ethan’s wife as leverage to get Ethan to find the Rabbit Foot for him.
The fact that this is the extent of the plot should give you a sense of how important probability and plausibility is in this film.
The first MI film was accused of being too confusing and too hard to follow, so director John Woo’s second installment was the antithesis, featuring an abundance of slow-motion shots of Tom Cruise walking amongst flames with doves slowly flying from beneath his feet…truly a poetic chaos.
The third film exchanges Woo’s graceful choreography for the currently popular hand-held camera use, which makes for grainy, out-of-focus and unsteady footage. Obviously meant to de-stabilize the film and add to the tension of the scene, it has been over used. Filmmakers need to uncover new techniques.
Early criticism of this film said that the character-building scenes were weak and just strung between one action sequence and the next. I didn’t feel that to be the case, though. You don’t sit down in this movie expecting to delve into the psyche of Ethan Hunt, we want to watch him blow stuff up. And on that bill, the film delivers.
To its credit, the action scenes did stay rather creative and memorable, and I could probably recall most of the individual scenes and mention something cool about them.

As far as the acting goes, we haven’t seen any new tricks out of Tom Cruise since the Last Samurai, (a good film) but now whenever Tom feels it necessary to truly be emotional, he puts on the same waterworks show combined with a heavy breathing. By this point, its not effective any more. Knowing Tom Cruise’s pride at doing all of his own stunts, and knowing his recent bizarre behavior, I found myself wondering if he ever took a nose dive off the roof of the Chinese skyscraper and the film crew just watched him go ‘splat’ on the ground 400,000 feet below. Everything we’ve seen at the film’s promotion is actually a cyborg, built out of state-of-the-art bionics and what they managed to scrape off of the sidewalk.
Philp Seymour Hoffman’s character has obviously been examined closely since his win for the film Capote, but I would have to say you would be disappointed if you were looking for a great film character to be born here. Hoffman’s character is sadly one-dimensional. The film knows that he’s there for us to hate, and we need not know anything more about him than that. His character actually devolves through the course of the film. His dialogue is more revealing and lengthy early in the film, and then by the end of the film he is reduced to the evil mastermind clichés including kicking Ethan Hunt in the face while he’s laying on the ground.

Overall, the film entertains. It’s a popcorn muncher, and if its any indication of what the summer season will look like, then we’re in for another high-octane low-content season.
Yippee!
Eventual Grade: C+

T.