Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to watch “Mission: Impossible III” without thinking about any of the following things: TomKat, Suri, Scientology, Oprah’s couch, how Tom Cruise was getting his driver’s license when Katie Holmes was born and the purported efficacy of psychotropic medication on the mentally ill. Not surprisingly, the impossible sequel in this Cruise-controlled franchise allows movie goers to do just that by blowing the crap out of any chance at coherent thought during the film’s 126 minutes of “intense sequences of frenetic violence and menace.” Since when did the Motion Picture Association of America employ the use of adjectives in its rating system anyway?
“M:I III,” which is co-written and directed by J.J. Abrams, the creator of TV’s “Lost,” “Alias” and “Felicity,” has Cruise return as IMF agent Ethan Hunt. Even though Hunt has retired from the field to train new super spies, he still lies about his job to his fiancée Julia (Michelle Monaghan). When Lindsey Ferris (Keri Russell), Hunt’s top-trainee, gets captured, Hunt’s boss (Billy Crudup) convinces him to return to the field. The rescue operation leads Hunt, old M:I standby Luther Strickell (Ving Rhames) and newcomers Zhen (Maggie Q) and Declan (Jonathan Rhys Myers) to an abandoned warehouse to rescue Ferris from the vile clutches of international arms dealer and all-around sinister bad guy Owen Davian (Philip Seymore Hoffman). Then enter the remote-controlled machine guns and magnetic grenades. Things explode. People jump out of a window onto a van and hang on for dear life as it speeds away. A helicopter crashes. Back to the plot.
After the mission, Hunt is assailed by CIA bigwig John Brasser (Laurence Fishburne) about how he’s been trying to get Davian for years, blah, blah, blah, and then it’s back to the action. The plot developments of the movie are so few and far between it’s a wonder the stunt men had time to catch their breaths at all.
Still, Abrams and Cruise offer up a few gems. The best of the bunch, in what is the movie’s only real “spy” sequence, occurs when Hunt and Co. sneak into the Vatican so they can infiltrate a party Davian is attending. Abrams builds the tension of the scene to a dramatic climax without resorting to the overt violence that permeates the rest of the film. Plus, we find out how they make the masks Hunt is always pulling off in dramatic fashion after he one-ups the bad guy. Abrams also manages to use the movie’s downtime to work in some believable feelings between Hunt and Julia, which adds some emotional depth to what would otherwise be any other Hollywood action movie ending.
While the action is almost non-stop, it is well-choreographed and Cruise’s sculpted biceps are shown off whenever possible. And if there’s a place to run to, Cruise is running: through CIA headquarters, on a bridge as missiles explode around him, up walls and off buildings. When Cruise ends up in Shanghai one wonders whether or not he sprinted across the Pacific to get there.
But this being the start of the summer movie blitz, anything other than eye-popping action sequences and mindless entertainment would equate weak returns at the box office. Paramount didn’t pony up $150 million for anything less. As far as sequels go, it exceeds its previous installments in almost every fashion and stands by itself as a solid action flick.
Regardless of the movie’s reliance on blowing things up over character development, “M:I III” will surely reap the benefits of the unstoppable TomKat machine (damn it!, we were this close!).