2006 / 126 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

According to the calendar, summer starts on June 21st, but each year Hollywood pushes it up a little earlier. I remember a time (not so long ago) that the big summer popcorn flicks didn’t start rolling out until Memorial Day weekend. But since the start of this millennium, Hollywood has advanced the start date earlier and earlier. Hence summer this year officially began on May 5th, when “Mission: Impossible 3” burst into theaters.

“Mission: Impossible” movies have never been all that amazing, so it’s really no wonder that this film was released first, as though Paramount were just trying to get this over with. Sure, it has Tom Cruise and even with his last couple of wacky shenanigans he still guarantees a large box office take, but otherwise these movies have always been “also-rans”. In 1996, the big summer flick was “Twister”. “Mission: Impossible” just happened to be there (and be cool-looking enough so that people went to it when they weren’t able to get “Twister” tickets). In 2000, “Gladiator” was the big dog in the kennel of May. “MI:2” was, again, just there to soak up some of the overflow. And now here we have “MI:3” which was sprung early into the box office summer sweepstakes so that it has a chance to make money before movies like “The Da Vinci Code” and “X-Men: The Last Stand” have a chance to get going. At least Paramount, the studio that always releases these movies, seems to know exactly what they’re dealing with.

But all of this is just market strategy. The real question is this: is “MI:3” any good? It may seem irrelevant from a monetary standpoint, but some of us are still concerned with the quality of our big, dumb explosion-filled summer zombie entertainment. Well, I am anyway…most of the time. And the answer to that question is: yeah. “MI:3” is pretty good. But if you haven’t seen the other Impossibles, there’s no real reason to care about this one either.

However, if you’re at all curious, this is a good place to start. Those who haven’t seen the other two have no continuing plotlines to understand or character motivations to get caught up on. The good(?) thing about these movies is that they seem to exist in a vacuum. They don’t really connect up. Aside from the presence of Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames (apparently the turnover rate in the spy industry is even worse than fast food and retail) none of the characters carry over. Nothing from one movie carries over into any of the others. Nothing transfers. They may as well have completely different titles.

As the film begins, Tom’s character (Ethan Hunt) is retiring from the spy game. He still trains new agents for the IMF (it stands for exactly what you think) but he gets to go home to his fiancée (Michelle Monaghan) at the end of the day. Unfortunately (as in all of these movies) this situation is not meant to last. Trouble is brewing in Germany. One of his protégés (Keri Russell, looking foxier than ever) has been captured by an odious arms dealer named Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Because he likes the girl, in a non-romantic, sensei/kohai sort of way, Hunt agrees to head the team that goes to Germany and tries to save her. Their efforts are intense but ultimately futile since Davian has implanted a small explosive in her brain and sets it off just when it would suck the most. This understandably pisses Tom/Ethan off, so he helps the IMF hunt Davian down, keeping the operation off the books just in case someone would object (their superior, Laurence Fishburne, really ripped into them over Keri Russell’s death). They capture Davian in an elaborate sting at the Vatican but before they can get any information out of him or have him brought to justice, he is rescued in a sequence that reminded me both of “True Lies” and “License to Kill” (an excellent Bond film from the unfairly maligned Timothy Dalton era). Soon, Davian has turned the tables on our hero, kidnapping his girlfriend and holding her hostage until Ethan acquires something known as The Rabbit’s Foot for him.

This is all rather routine, really. If you’ve seen a spy movie before, nothing here is going to stun you. But the film rises above most spy films because of its excellent command of suspense. Even when I knew what was coming, I was on the edge of my seat during this film. The action sequences are staged with flair and heart-pounding immediacy. The movie even avoids the tired, erratic, “You are there” style of filmmaking that marred the last Bourne film…until the two-thirds mark. The actors all invest their roles with enough emotion that we care what happens to them, which is all that is necessary in a film like this. Cruise is particularly good. He’s so good you manage to forget his couch jumping antics for the entire movie. And he gets solid support from Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Laurence Fishburne and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. But the real reason to watch this movie is Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman gives one of his finest performances here, and I’m not even kidding. I was more impressed by his performance here than in the overrated “Capote” of last winter. He’s a classic bad guy. He doesn’t go overboard with this character either. He plays Davian with a naturalism that is chilling. How chilling? Well, let me put it this way: it’s easy for a villain to be intimidating when he’s got the good guy tied to a chair, but Davian is even intimidating when the hero has HIM tied to a chair! He’s always one step ahead of our hero, he oozes a sort of evil charisma, and he kills without compunction and without even making a big deal out of it. He’s simply bad news all around, and Hoffman is better at this than anyone in recent memory.

Hoffman is better than the rest of the film, really. Aside from him, this stuff is good, potent even, but the movie pretty much goes in one eye and out the other. It’s not as unique as the “Bourne” films. It uses great suspense, visual flash and chronological trickery to hide a fairly routine plot and standard issue characters. Plus, as in most of these films, there is a mole within the spy agency. After five seasons of “24” and countless spy movies, this particular plot point should probably be retired. It’s not even shocking anymore.

Also, Michelle Monaghan and Tom share zero chemistry, something that really sabotages the plot of the film. If we don’t buy that Tom and Michelle really love each other, how are we supposed to buy all the stuff he’s doing to save her? He shares more chemistry with Russell’s character early on than he does with Monaghan. In fact, that would have been an interesting angle for the film to explore. Say Cruise was tired of field work and wanted to settle down with a nice girl (like the current plot) and yet he finds himself irresistibly attracted to Keri Russell, a great fighter young enough to actively enjoy and long for work in the spy field. This, of course, creates friction between them. Tom could explain why he can’t act on his love for her, why it will never work out…and then great drawn into the field to save her when a mission goes wrong. Then, of course, she gets killed and Tom gets pissed and then it would basically turn into a spy Mel Gibson movie. Now there is a film I’d like to see. There is a plot that doesn’t adhere to all the usual conventions. It’s not Shakespeare, but at least it isn’t by the numbers. It’d be a lot more interesting than Tom’s bland love affair with Michelle Monaghan, who looks a little too much like Katie Holmes for comfort. None of this is Tom’s fault. Tom tries to make us believe he loves Michelle in this movie, but for some reason they never quite click.

I don’t know, maybe he should have jumped on a couch or something.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.