Mission Impossible 3 (or, The Revenge of Xenu)

Watching Tom Cruise nowadays it is hard to divorce the crazy crackpot loon from the face on the screen. Of course it doesn't help that both Tom Cruise's public persona and his acting have always relied relatively heavily on his inane grin. I am happy = inane grin; I am cheeky = inane grin; I am smug = inane grin. I am in love = inane grin (and couch leaping). Looking back on M:I:iii very little of Tom's grinning/acting remains with me, there was no passion to his performance because he now comes across as an emotional charlatan. The public image of Tom Cruise, which I think is stuck with the aliens at the bottom of James Cameron's abyss, does damage this film but I have to say: Who gives a shit.

This film is an action adventure film. It is tense in the right places, gripping in the right places, it never lets up until it needs to, it is just over the top enough to be entertaining. You guessed it: this is Alias on the big screen. M:I:iii has a definite Alias feel, so much so that it is easy to mistake Ving Rhames for Dixon and Johnathon Rhys Meyers for Vaughn and yes Tom has to be Sydney but you don't get everything.

What you do get are some amazing set pieces. A helicopter chase in a wind farm, a break in to Vatican City, a shit fight on a bridge and some highwire catapulting through Shanghai. They are big, gritty, camera-shaky set pieces that pile one unbelievable action on top of another and yet the stack stays solid. The success of M:I:iii lays in its structure; where most heist films spend an eternity setting up the operation, here you are thrown straight into it and the joy of seeing the ingenuity of each plan unfold one surprising step at a time makes for entertaining action. Yeah, it's brainless fun but it is a summer blockbuster.

So it is a good film. Without Tom it probably could have been a great film. J.J. Abrams set up the emotional playing field beautifully. Philip Seymour Hoffman is chilingly good as the psychopathic hard-arse and Keri Russell does amazingly well to build a memorable character out of about three minutes of screen time. The best thing is that this film will surely pave the way for J.J. to get some other big screen gigs so it is only a matter of time till we see the Alias movie.

Good things come...

Tags: movie review