Mission: Impossible III - Miiiiiiiiiii!
I avoided this film for weeks because I hate Tom Cruise. I was trying to figure out when the tide turned, because I used to like Tom Cruise.
I'm sure I already hated him before the whole weird Oprah's Couch Adventure, and I hated him before the Scientology crap started to spew. I can't quite recall if it was the time he sued two people into silence about him being gay, or the time he suddenly divorced Nicole just days before he'd have to give her half his money as part of a pre-nup he signed. The man has no balls. Yet he always pretends they're made of high grade stainless steel, assuming stainless steel comes in grades.
In truth, I could have gone my entire life without seeing this film if only to avoid putting any more money into Mr. Cruise's tight-fitting pockets (gay) except that a friend and his girlfriend both agreed that it was "worth seeing," and it was a shame that it wasn't as massive a hit "as it deserved to be, in spite of Tom's assholishness." Or words to that effect. And with an empty Sunday afternoon to fill up, my manfriend and I found ourselves sitting in a half-empty Metreon theatre (the one all the way on the far end, around the corner, past the always closed consession stand and the empty Poseiden: The IMAX Adventure theatre, munching decent popcorn without yellow popcorn "flavoring" and sucking on a giant Cherry Coke waiting for the commercials to stop.
By the way, have you seen those new Sprite commercials? The "subLYMONal" ones, where giant yellow and green things are injected or inserted or dripped on people like this is how one wants to feel while enjoying a refreshing drink? Exremely weird, but entirely effective as advertising because look, I just remembered it out of all the other stupid commercials shown to me on that giant screen and I'm sharing it with you. Even though I drink Coke Zero. Which is delicious.
The film starts off with a ballsy premise. It shows you the ending, so you know that everything about to happen over the next two hours will not effect Tom in the least. While that's hardly surprising - after all, when was the last time the hero actually died in one of these technical masterpieces of noise and nothingness? So you know going in what happens at the end, but you're still willing to sit there for two and a half hours not peeing just to get back to that point.
Because if MI:3 is nothing else, it is effective. Ving Rhames returns as the only other character to have appeared in all three films, the new team consists of two very capable operatives whose names aren't important and whose acting talent consists almost entirely of fitting into tight quarters or taking pictures with hidden cameras. Still, somehow, you're hoping none of them die because you sense that something is going on here that you can't see, and neither can they, or maybe they can, and who's zooming who, here, anyway?
Helicopters dodge windmills, bridges blow up, cars and vans fly through the air, Tom does his usual two acting "looks" (the mega-watt smile and the determined scowl) shit explodes, rubber masks are torn off and applied using some very effective CGI and Philip Seymour Hoffman manages somehow to steel every scene he's in by remaining absolutely calm amid the turmoil that Tom is causing.
I really did need to pee very badly by the time the film was done (damnable "medium" Cherry Coke!) which is a testament to its overall enjoyability. It's tensely fun. It's dangerously giddy. It flies from The Vatican to Hong Kong to Berlin to Maryland's Chesapeake Bay Bridge and blows up everything it can find. It succeeds in spite of Tom Cruise. Hell, even Vin Diesel might've managed to get away with this film, that's how slick it is.
It's a vehicle that works not because you care about what happens to the characters and not because you want to figure out the convolutions of the plot and not because it's pretty (because mostly it's just dark), it succeeds because all those ingredients are there just under the surface, but the revenge fantasy is strong enough that you will not be satisfied until the bad guys are dead, dead, dead.
Also, you're curious about whether New Tom will explode in some wild halucinagenic tirade against psychology again. Which is almost as much fun to watch as M:I III, or "Miiiii!" as Stephen Colbert called it.
4 out of 5 stars for not needing Tom Cruise and supplying two satisfying endings.
