‘Lost’ creator J.J. Abrams puts his stamp on the latest installment of Tom Cruise’s franchise, doling out visceral action at a propulsive pace.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
As we morph with alarming speed into a can’t-do nation, unable to build levees that can withstand hurricanes, or find ways to secure our ports and airports, or manufacture a car that doesn’t mainline the gas that’s become a national addiction, there’s one thing we still do better than anyone else. We’re great at making movies about can-do heroes, brimming with the cutting-edge technology, heroic interventions, and triumphal endings that we aren’t so good at producing in reality. In fact, the worse we get at actually doing stuff, the better we get at faking it.
Mission: Impossible III is a prime example of the big, dumb movies we’re getting so expert at making and I mean that as a compliment. Like the Harry Potter series, Mission: Impossible gives sequels a good name. That’s because star/producer Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner have been smart about picking a different and distinctive director for each movie and letting him put his stamp on it and their latest is the best of the three.
Like its predecessors, M:I-3 uses standard spy-movie conventions like elaborate heists, fantastic feats of physical daring, exotic locations and plenty of planes, trains, automobiles, helicopters and motorbikes. It also has the cool toys, gunfights, chase scenes and explosions, and enough double-crossing to leave you cross-eyed. And there are still opportunities for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his super-cool and preternaturally attractive teammates at the Impossible Mission Force to disguise themselves. Sometimes they just change clothes, but they also like to pull on rubber face masks molded to make them look exactly like somebody else.
The first Mission: Impossible, directed by Brian De Palma, moved right along, but it was a little hard to follow at times, and a little too cool to draw you in emotionally. John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II was beautiful but soulless, like a callow supermodel, and the periods between its action sequences were often too long and turgid. M:I-3, which is directed and co-written by J.J. Abrams, the creator of TV’s Alias and Lost, starts with an almost painfully visceral scene and keeps up the propulsive pace for almost all of its 126 minutes, though I could have done without one or two of the chase scenes toward the end.
The first movie came out 10 years ago, when Cruise was still a cocky kid. On one level, he’s much better suited for the role now, his crow’s feet and gray hairs making him more believable as a seasoned agent who can talk, think, or fight his way out of any situation. At the same time, the intensity he pours into his acting reads differently now that we’ve seen it play out in "real" life, in the form of couch-jumping and other icky antics. Watching Hunt avidly romance his fiancée, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), is like looking at a double exposure, with the ghost of TomKat partially obscuring the main image. Even the way Cruise runs, maintaining an unvarying pace and pumping his arms like a cyborg, looks a little creepy these days.
M:I-3 has a great villain in Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who seems utterly ruthless and psychotic. Hunt’s team is as great-looking as always: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, using what is presumably his native Irish accent; Zhen (Maggie Q), doing very little besides looking beautiful; and Luther (Ving Rhames), in a return engagement on the computer keyboards.
Together, the four break into one "impenetrable" fortress after another. Along the way, they blow things up, dodge barrages of bullets and fusillades of smart bombs, and hang from the edges of helicopters, skyscrapers and bridges. Most of this mayhem seems jarringly real, which helps to generate real suspense even though Luther speaks for us all when he exclaims, after Hunt pulls off a super-heroic leap between two skyscrapers: "He made it! He made it! I knew he’d make it."
There are enough plot twists to keep you interested but not so many that you ever lose your way, and Davian’s way of getting to his enemies feels particularly creepy in this age of kidnappings and bioterrorism: He gets inside them, either by kidnapping their loved ones to torment them psychologically or by injecting their bodies with lethal or debilitating substances. He’s particularly fond of planting an explosive in a person’s skull that can be detonated by remote control.
Fortunately, the detonation follows the time-honored villain’s code outlined by Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil, who insisted on killing his captives by shutting them in a room with a tank full of sharks rather than just shooting them, as his son begged him to. It takes four minutes after detonation for the thing in Hunt’s head to go off, so you can be sure he’ll find a way to deactivate it before it kills him. Meanwhile, the fun is in seeing how he does it.
It’s easy to underestimate nutritionally empty, artificially flavored confections like this, but it’s hard to make one that’s this tasty. M:I-3 may be nothing but empty calories, but sometimes all you want is dessert.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of frenetic violence and menace, disturbing images and some sensuality.

