Mission: Impossible III (Theatrical Film Review)
Stars: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Michelle
Monaghan
Director: J.J. Abrams
Critic's rating: 4 out of 10
Review by Chuck O'Leary
To my dying day I will never understand the appeal of the
obnoxiously overexposed freak show known as Tom Cruise. His ability to
stay at or near the top of the box office for 20 years makes you wonder what
kind of deal he made with the devil. At this point, why anybody would
want to spend their hard-earned money to see this deranged dwarf is
beyond comprehension.
What do people possibly see in Cruise? He's not a
great actor, he's not that good looking and he has a toothy smile
that brings to mind the phoniest of politicians. And for the women who
like him, remember how his voluptuous first wife, Mimi Rogers, said he was
never interested in her. And when he tries to play the tough
guy, he's about as convincing as Richard Simmons. Then comes this
whole Katie Holmes having his baby episode over the last year, which
felt like Rosemary's Baby come to life.
Furthermore, you can't turn on the television anymore without
hearing those two dreaded words: Tom Cruise. Entertainment
Tonight, a show produced by Paramount, a studio where Cruise
frequently works, is especially guilty. At least half of Entertainment
Tonight's programming seems to be devoted to Cruise. It's enough
to make you want to do what Elvis Presley once did when Robert Goulet appeared
on television, and shoot out the set. If I had a dollar for every time I
heard Mary Hart perkily say "Tom Cruise" I'd be a rich man.
Now comes Mission: Impossible III, which is a
slight improvement over the first two, but that's not saying much since the
first two were godawful. After recently sitting through the gut-wrenching
United 93, a movie about real-life heroes, it's hard to
believe overproduced nonsense like M:I3 is what
most audiences want to see.
United 93 is a movie that stays with you for hours after leaving
the theater. M:I3, on the other hand, starts evaporating
from memory before you reach the exit door.
Despite a bigger budget and direction by J.J. Abrams (creator of
TV's Alias and Lost), M:I3
is yet another disposable Hollywood "thrill-ride" as manufactured as
Cruise's image. Like so many Hollywood
action-fantasies nowadays, it's a lot of sound and motion signifying
nothing.
To explain the plot of any of the Mission: Impossible
movies is pointless. Here the MacGuffin is something called "the
rabbit's foot," which secret agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and illegal-arms
dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) both are seeking. The
rabbit's foot is merely an excuse to string together another series of
badly-edited action sequences where no shot, save the occasional close-up of
Cruise, lasts longer than three seconds. A lot of money was spent
trying to excite us, but due to the constant quick cutting, the result is
mostly chaos. And in spite of a few visually
striking locations, we've seen all this stuff too many times before
and better, most notably in James Cameron's True Lies.
The only difference between M:I3 and its
predecessors is an added personal angle with the newly-married Hunt
attempting to save his kidnapped wife (Michelle Monaghan) from Hoffman's
villain. This gives Cruise plenty of opportunities to get
teary-eyed and emote that angry look he gets in real-life when
some reporter asks him a question he doesn't like. Anybody who's as sick
of Cruise as I am will surely be rooting for Hoffman.
From dodging missiles to sliding down the side of a
skyscraper, Cruise does everything but fly in M:I3.
During one scene of him running, it honestly looks as if he's
about to take flight. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's
Superscientologist!
