May 5, 2006 -- “Mission Impossible III” is a non-stop action film that never relents. It is a perfect summer popcorn movie, even if it is still springtime. Just turn your mind off and the popcorn will follow. I don't know if Tom Cruise is unhinged or not, but the guy does know how to put on a good show.

Cruise reprises his role from the first two films as super spy Ethan Hunt and Ving Rhames returns as computer hacker sidekick Luther Stickell. In this episode, Hunt is retired and is getting married to a pretty doctor, Julia (Michelle Monaghan of “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”). Then he gets pulled back into the IMF to rescue a pretty young agent he trained, Lindsey (Keri Russell of “The Upside of Anger”). This gets him into a hot spot with a mole in IMF and on the hit list of an evil arms dealer, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman of “Capote”). Julia is held hostage by Davian and Hunt must race around the world to save her. He is on the run both from the IMF and from Davian, who desperately wants to kill him. Hunt does have a few friends he can count on, though.

The film achieves a high level of tension from the first scene on by means of a suspense-filled flashback. By the time we get back to that scene, near the end of the film, we have had plenty of time to wonder how Hunt is going to get out of this seemingly impossible situation. The film is littered with high-tech gadgets, including an attack drone aircraft, a face and voice duplicator, a Star Trek-like medical scanner, spray-on foam acid for opening locked vans and tiny bombs that can be implanted inside a person's brain. The stunts, fights and action sequences are all first-rate. The pacing of the film is so fast and there is so much non-stop action, you don't really have time to think about the holes in the plot.

The film also benefits from some top flight acting talent such as Cruise, Rhames, Hoffman (Academy Award winner), Laurence Fishburne of “The Matrix” movies, Billy Crudup of “Almost Famous” and Jonathan Rhys Meyers of “Match Point.” Also effective is the lovely Maggie Q as agent Zhen. There is very little character development and the story is thin, but this is a popcorn movie. This is the kind of movie that is supposed to be entertaining escapism, and it is. It delivers exactly what a summer film should. This film rates a B.

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Copyright © 2006 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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