Mission: Impossible III

I don't care what you have to say about Tom Cruise. We all know he's lost it somewhere along the line, or he's always been nuts and has been hiding it ridiculously well all these years.

The fact is that he's a great performer. Put him in a Jerry Maguire and he'll make your date cry. Put him in a Last Samurai and you want to start taking sword fighting classes. Put him in a Collateral and you want to be a hitman.

His first turn as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible was a great spy thriller with the appropriate twists and turns. Mission: Impossible II, though not a perfect follow-up, was a pretty kickin' action turn. And now, Mission: Impossible III was an absolutely nail-baiting action-thriller.

One of the concepts that started with M:I:II was getting a different director to helm each project, to see what exciting direction each director could take it in. Brian De Palma, who gave us Scarface and the fascinating Femme Fatale, directed the first one, while John Woo lent his "ballet of bullets" style of action sequences to the franchise. J.J. Abrams, director of the incredible "Lost," now infuses his unique brand of storytelling with the series' lexicon.

One of the key elements of Abrams' stories is his flash-forwards/backs. You can notice it in "Lost," where each episode explores a different character's back story, giving us insight into that character. M:I:III is no different, as the movie opens up to a scene presumably from somewhere in the middle of the story. It opens up with Tom Cruise strapped to a chair across from his lady, and Philip Seymour Hoffman with a gun in his hand, saying, "You have an explosive device in your head. Sound familiar?"

Not yet, but it will soon enough.

Hoffman proceeds to grill Cruise and interrogate him, threatening to kill the lady if he doesn't 'fess up. And, as a testament to Cruise's performance abilities, as each number counts up to ten, he goes from desperate confusion, to angry threatening, to hopeless pleading and bargaining.
Hoffman reaches ten, a shot rings out, and the screen goes black. Now that's a pre-opening credits sequence.

From then on, it's a fairly straight-forward story. Cruise is now not an operating field officer, but a training officer for IMF, and is getting engaged to Michelle Monaghan (see: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang). He gets called onto a mission that goes wrong somehow, and is left to figure out why.

Throw in a very cool mission that gets pulled off without a hitch, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a very maniacal bad-guy, a simply stunning action sequence on a bridge, and some office administrative double-crossings, and you've got your basic spy action-thriller.

The supporting characters are just as important. Simon Pegg shows up as the office-side technical support/comic relief in his first American-made film (to the best of my knowledge), other than a very brief cameo as a zombie in George A. Romero's Land of the Dead.

The big beef I have with this movie is the ending. Although I won't get into it now so as to not ruin it, suffice it to say that it seemed very tacked-on and disconnected. I get a feeling that there was a different ending intended, but was changed before releasing.


Who cares if Tom Cruise has a crazy personal life? That's Hollywood. Beck's a scientologist, too, you know. Is that going to stop you from buying his next 17 albums? It's all the gossip about personal lives that makes movies perform poorly. A lot of people missed out on this great flick just because of Tom Cruise's personal life. I went to the theater to see this, told everyone I knew, and 9 out of 10 times, I got back, "I know...I just think he's out of his mind."

As a result of the movie's poor performance, Cruise's production company with Paula Wagner was cut loose, and there can at this time be no more Cruise-starring Mission: Impossible sequels. The rumor around the internet is that Brad Pitt will pick it up.

Now my question to you is: How exactly would the movie explain that?



You. Go rent this movie, then buy it to watch it over again. Now.