I’ve always been skeptical of summer blockbusters. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the action or pointless storyline, I do, but there are times when it seems I’ve seen it all before. Mission Impossible 3 is no different. There’s a bunch of action and no plot, but you know what, I’m okay with that. I actually enjoyed myself very much.
The movie starts out with the end and then flashes back to however many days or months previous to the event. The basic premise of the story is, Ethan Hunt is getting married to a normal woman (a woman who doesn’t know about his background), and trying to get out of the IMF or at least not try to take as many missions. But of course he gets suckered back into work and then discovers that maybe there’s a conspiracy and so on, his wife gets kidnapped and he has to find the rabbit’s foot in order to get her back. There’s the standard bad guy Owen Davian (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the standard bad guy kicking the good guy’s ass until the very end. It’s nice to know that even though the bad guy always has better information and technology they still always lose. If only that worked in real life. But this calls for some pretty crazy action sequences. There’s even a cool scene where we see the mask of Davian being made by some computer program and lasers, I’m not quite sure.
I would have to say that this movie is the best out of the three. It’s got more interesting plans, more “believable†action, and the acting is better. As always Tom Cruise is the star and steals the limelight, although the asian chick, Maggie Q doesn’t do too bad a job being sexy. What bothers me most about all the mission impossible movies is that it centers around Ethan Hunt. The original TV series stresses the teamwork of these agents and that one cannot do without the other. It seems in this movie as well that Tom Cruise can just as well do everything by himself, but he has the other people to do the dirty work. Granted this one does show the importance of every one’s skills, but still, Ethan Hunt is the main focus. I would like to have learned more about these other characters, why they got into the profession and what makes them tick. The only thing we get is maybe a little romance between Zhen (Maggie Q) and Benji (Simon Pegg), but even then Tom Cruise steals the limelight. And I’m probably asking too much from a Hollywood blockbuster, but maybe a little more of a non-predictable story. Sure you get jerked around a little, but I still figured out who was the bad guy before it was even revealed at the end. But I have to admit, the action is pretty insane. There’s not as much slow motion in this movie as the second and although it is pretty far fetched, it all seems plausible taking into account that Cruise is supposed to be a secret agent. He doesn’t make all the jumps, he doesn’t get out unscathed, but he does come out alive and on the winning side, and well isn’t that what the movie’s about? Maybe the one thing that would have been interesting to change in the movie is the end. I’m not going to give it away but it could have been interesting if the movie director and writer decided to kill off some more of the good guys, but that’s just me.
Overall, this is a great movie to watch in theaters. It’s got action, love, intrigue, and well more action. And although the story and character development are lacking and it is extremely predictable, that’s what we love so much about summer movies, we know that we’re just going to get a lot of action without a lot of substance, but that’s ok. We would expect no less from Hollywood.
"Mission: Impossible 3" opens May 5, 2006 and is rated PG13. Action. Directed by JJ Abrams. Written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman. Starring Billy Crudup, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Keri Russell, Laurence Fishburne, Michelle Monaghan , Philip Seymour Hoffman, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Maggie Q.
