From the Hootoo archive. Originally published May 18th 2006:
[Originally following a review of Slither.]
Funnily enough, we go from a film about bizarre and unnatural methods of reproduction to Tom Cruise’s latest project. (Yeah, yeah, bring on your lawyers: you ain’t got nothing on me!) This is Mission: Impossible 3, as if you didn’t already know, co-written and directed by JJ Abrams, the creator of Alias and Lost. This is one franchise which isn’t afraid to drag its feet while the Cruiser gets on with other things – it’s ten years since Brian de Palma’s (quite nifty) original, and six since John Woo’s (kinetic but soulless) follow-up. Well anyway, clearly it has been decreed it’s time for a third installment and our presence in the multiplex is clearly expected.
As you would expect given the director’s pedigree, this latest outing finds Tom Cruise stranded on a tropical island with an invisible monster and a female student who’s secretly a top spy. Ha! Ha! Oh, my sides. All right – it doesn’t really. Instead, our toothsome inch-high superspy has gone into semi-retirement as a trainer of other agents and is all set for domestic bliss with his fiancee – no, it’s not Thandie Newton from the last movie, she clearly got sick of never being allowed to wear heels, it’s someone new. But then – wouldn’t you know it! – one of Tom’s trainees gets into trouble and he’s sent in to rescue her. This does not go entirely to plan and Tom finds himself on the wrong side of lardy arms dealer Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose main hobby is putting bombs up peoples’ noses. A fink within the IMF eventually gives Hoffman the forwarding address of Tom’s new bride and our hero finds himself having to nick a crucial plot device Macguffin for him before his wife gets put six feet under and his own sinuses get decongested with extreme prejudice…
Despite what you may be thinking, Abrams does work fairly hard to make this more than just a cynical cash-in on the Mission: Impossible name. The premise of the show (each week a disparate team of Impossible Missionaries got sent on an unfeasibly complicated, er, mission) is reflected in the structure of the movie – obviously Tom is the Chief Impossible, aided by Deputy Impossible Ving Rhames (yup, back again, still with moustache) and Assistant Impossibles Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. (Our own Simon Pegg pops up in a couple of scenes as a very junior Impossible who isn’t let out of HQ, presumably because his costume isn’t stylish enough.) Anyway the film is written so Tom and the gang have to go Impossibling in a different location every thirty minutes or so – there is a good deal of globe-trotting involved in this but with the exception of a ridiculous caper inside the Vatican all the locations are used strictly as ‘colour’ – apart from the trip to Rome, they could probably have set the whole film within thirty miles of Birmingham without it needing very much in the way of rewriting. Lalo Schifrin’s classic theme gets blasted out fairly regularly too, which is nice, but the classic ‘your mission, if you choose to accept it…’ schtick is very nearly abandoned, which isn’t.
The plot is fairly bonkers, but acceptably so, and the film only really gets dull in between bouts of Impossibling. At these points Tom hangs out with Ving Rhames (who used to be an ace hacker but who, to judge from his interest in Tom’s personal life, has since retrained as a relationship counsellor) or gets dragged over the coals by snippy IMF boss Laurence Fishburne, who appears to have been on the pies since finishing the Matrix trilogy. Both of these are fairly grim but much, much worse are the segments where we get to see Tom and his missus hanging out and generally just being in love with each other. Yes, Tom’s teeth go into overdrive, flashing and pulsating away like an Aldis lamp. To be fair, his performance throughout is also quite acceptable but the fact remains that when on screen, no matter what the movie, he frequently looks completely nuts – and when, as in this case, the script does not address that fact, the results are rarely entirely satisfying. Hoffman, who’s a much more versatile performer, gets considerably less screentime and his part is so thinly written even an actor of his abilities struggles to really make an impression.
JJ Abrams does a decent job as a debut director, with a fair eye for a striking composition. He achieves some neat effects, too: in particular a sequence where real-live-Tom-in-a-Hoffman mask is seamlessly replaced by Hoffman himself playing Tom-in-a-Hoffman mask is very neatly done. He seems to be aware of the dangers of franchise fatigue as well – one of the set-piece bits of Impossibling here is dangerously similar to one from earlier in the series, and Abrams handles it in an unexpected way that keeps it relatively fresh. He also handles the blatant nature of the central Macguffin with amusing impudence – though whether this is done as a post-modern in-joke or as an act of sheer desperation I don’t know. I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but only if he explains what those ruddy numbers are all about by the end of the year…
In the end, though, this is a fairly sterile and mechanical piece of entertainment. The individual bits of Impossibling are entertaining and amusing and there are some effective bits of action along the way – but the climax is rather low-key, and the film’s attempts to be politically relevant come across as strained and spurious. It doesn’t play with the audience’s expectations in the way the first film did, and doesn’t have much in the way of novelty value either. As a popcorn movie, it works, and I expect it will do very well at the box office. But the prospect of a six year wait before the next instalment doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
No Chic. Just Geek. 