JJ Abrams, 2006, US, 126 mins
Cast: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Monaghan
Review by Mike Bartlett
If Mission:Impossible III were a brochure for boys’ toys, it would be a five-star winner. It’s like that moment when you’re been battling through the Sunday papers only for one of those leaflets to drop out advertising lots of daft gizmos and gadgets that serve absolutely no purpose and which you’ve just got to have. The ingenuity on display here is fantastic – from pocket pens that measure how far down it is to the ground to amazing mask-making machines. And the director JJ Abrams takes great relish in displaying them in a run of exciting set pieces. The scene where Agent Ethan dons a mask in order to impersonate the villain is so technically impressive that I genuinely couldn’t tell if it was Cruise under all that latex or whether the editor hadn’t cannily spliced the film together to enable the actors to switch places.
But unfortunately, it’s not a brochure, it’s a film – and that’s where the problems start. You’d think that a franchise based on something as fun as the original TV series, with gorgeously cheesy catchphrases like “This message will self-destruct in five seconds”, would itself be a light-hearted blast. And when Abrams is let loose on the action, it is. Ethan receives the aforementioned message through the viewfinder of a dinky portable camera – a scene so ludicrous I take my hat off to the Cruisemeister for keeping a straight face – and later on, he dresses up as a priest sporting a crucifix that’s actually a bomb. Wonderful tongue-in-cheek silliness.
But oh, no, where’s this story coming from? Ethan is about to embark on a serious relationship full of strained meetings and moody silences? Corruption in the ranks? Surreptitious comments on US foreign policy? No, JJ, the ingredients don’t mix – don’t drown the zesty taste in heavy sauces. And the lesson of every James Bond film (which MI has surpassed in technical if not entertainment terms)? Match the villain to the action. But the baddie here is so thoroughly evil, so beautifully played – Seymour Hoffman sails through the film as if realising that winning an Oscar was easy after all – that the balance of the film tilts in his favour and a Saturday night popcorn flick suddenly feels dark and murky. And don’t introduce emotional weight if you can’t handle the consequences. It’s all very well creating complex characters but when they blow people away for the first time in their lives and don’t bat an eyelid, you’ve lost any chance of conviction.
But, hey, there’s an action hero or heroine lurking inside all of us and, if we agree to ignore the plot, MI3 will be the success everyone’s predicting. And while there’s hundreds of better films that have secured a place in my memory, I’m still trying to work out just how Ethan swung onto that glass building…
Discuss this film here
|
