In a bid for some together time and recreation, Malaya and I caught a matinee yesterday. She'd been wanting to see Mission Impossible 3 since last weekend, when I was out of town, and she also wanted to see Poseidon, which was opening this weekend. I was pretty indifferent to them both, so I let her pick, and she chose MI3. So off we went.
Surprisingly, to me at least, it wasn't bad. I've got to agree with the critical consensus, which stands
at 71% on RT. It's a fun popcorn movie, with more grittiness and violence and plot twists than I expected. I found it pretty enjoyable, and almost wish I'd ever seen an episode of Alias, if the writer of that could manage this. If the film had starred anyone but Tom Cruise, I would have really enjoyed it. More on that in a bit, but first, to the scores:
Mission Impossible III, 2006
Script & Story: 7
Acting & Casting: 2/8
Action: 9
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: 4
Horror: 4
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7.5
You can pretty well disregard the humor and horror scores, since the film doesn't try to be a comedy, though it has some jokes, and it doesn't try to be scary, though there are some thrills and scary moments. Which leaves the only bad score a split one. My Acting/Casting score is a two-parter; the 2 is for Tom Cruise in any scene of quiet love with his movie girlfriend, and the 8 is for everyone else, including Tom Cruise in scenes of action.
If I'd never read any celebrity gossip or heard about Cruise in the news during the past two years, I'd have enjoyed every aspect of the movie. Unfortunately, I haven't been living in a cave (well, at least not one with out an internet connection), and I'm all too aware of just how fully Tommy boy has bought into the nuttiness of his cult of choice, and how incredibly awkward and forced his smiles and those of Katie Holmes are at their photo ops, and so on. *shudders at the memory*
For that reason, the scenes early in MI3, where he's hugging his movie fiancee (played by
Michelle Monaghan) and kissing her and saying how much he loves her were not just unconvincing -- they were actively creepy. The fact that Michelle looks a good deal like Katie Holmes definitely didn't help. If she'd been blonde or Asian or Hispanic or just about anything but a pretty brown-haired white girl, it would have been a huge improvement. As it was, I was literally squirming in my seat while my no-longer-suspended disbelief floated in a puddle of embarrassment and waited for the explosions to begin. Fortunately, there aren't more than 3 or 4 scenes of that type, they only last a minute or two each, and they're all dispensed with early in the film. And after that, it's all pretty good stuff.
It's funny, and Malaya made this point after the film; Tom Cruise was much more believable saying he loved the girl in this movie than he is in real life when he talks about Katie Holmes. As I said, if I hadn't know anything about him going into MI3, I wouldn't have had any real objections to it (well, the plot is utterly ridiculous, but that's sort of expected with this type of cinema). But I did know about him; I knew far more than I wanted to about him, and as a result the movie's tender, emotional scenes were just painful.
As for the action and plot, it's all very good. I haven't really seen either MI1 or MI2, since I've been actively avoiding Tom Cruise films since my teen years, but I've caught parts of them on cable here and there, and they're not bad. Sort of formulaic and "007 with a team" to my eye, but competent thrillers. This one was better, with a clever plot, double crosses, misdirections, crazy action sequences, and so forth. Very little of it strictly believable in a world with physics and thinking humans, but it wasn't a completely ridiculous video game, ALA
Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and I found myself caring about the outcome, while not being entirely-confident how things would happen. And that's rare, with a popcorn movie, since you know the good guys will always win in the end.
Overall, I'll recommend it. Slightly if you're like me and sort of horrified by Tom Cruise. Heavily, if you don't mind his nuttiness or are confident you can overlook it in this instance. The action stuff and tech stuff and mission impossible schemes are fun, if full of ridiculous holes in retrospect, but overall, it's a popcorn movie summer thriller, and does about all you could ask of one, once the action gets going and Tommy stops hugging and nuzzling his
captive fiancee wife.
Labels: movie review, tom cruise
