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Mission: Impossible III May 7, 2006 |
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I went into a movie the other day called “Mission: Impossible III” and was surprised to be treated to an episode of “24”. The lead character’s name was no longer Jack Bauer but Ethan Hunt, his agency was no longer CTU but IMF, his time constraints were no longer limited to ticking minutes but to agonizing hours, and his primary objective was no longer to bring down the secretly duplicitous head of the nation, yet to take down the secretly duplicitous head of his own organization. Okay, maybe “M:I:III” isn’t a rip-off of “24”, maybe the premise of “24”, about an unstoppable super agent who kills at will, makes himself invisible to the enemy, and is supported by a tight-knit group of computer savvy techs and snappy expensive gadgets, was born out of Ethan Hunt in 1996’s original “Mission: Impossible” film, but nobody remembers that film these days, nor its 2000 sequel, so it’s easier to cite the new and improved Hunt as a doppelganger of TV’s ruthless Bauer, than it is to suggest that Bauer is a TV version of a big-screen Tom Cruise creation. Adding to the ease in which I can so blatantly argue that the big-screen blockbuster is comparable to a weekly television drama is that, indeed, it’s makers come from television, namely the spy series “Alias”, which, if you ask most experts, is centered around a female version of Jack Bauer, only she stretches out her adventures beyond a one day format, and gets to wear cute disguises in the process, but it’s all relative, and seeing how great TV is these days, I guess it was only a matter of time before our TV makers started trickling up to the big leagues with ideas that, frankly, could play just as well in serialized 60-minute format. That said, “24” is the best action series on TV, so how bad could it possibly be if I walked into a two-hour long summer spy movie and came out with nothing but analogies about why Ethan Hunt is in fact a Tom Cruise variation on Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer? The answer is, in truncated form, not all that bad, and in a more sophisticated form, not that bad at all. Sure it’s mindless action fluff, characters are textbook good and evil, plots twist like a confused pretzel, dialogue is as punchy as a fourth grade bully (and as smart), and the ring of bullets and explosions in your head afterwards is enough to make the most ardent Bauerian scholar worn out with battle fatigue, but it’s all in good fun, I think, and the more fun we have with movies like this, the easier it is to playfully slip into the summer movie season without a care in the world. Directed by first time big-screen director J.J. Abrams, creator of “Alias” and co-creator of the current TV masterpiece “Lost”, “Mission: Impossible III” is a film of no limitations, everything and anything can, and does, happen to Ethan Hunt during his mission, and he does it without blinking an eye. His mission this time around, after choosing to accept it, is to rescue a kidnapped IMF agent (Keri Russell, from Abrams’ defunct “Felicity”) from the black-market arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman, stealing scenes as usual), and in the process gather info about Davian’s international dealings with terrorist organizations. Davian is a perfect screen villain, rich beyond belief, sneaky, heartless, coy, smart, ruthless, and just oblivious enough to be able to threaten a man like Ethan Hunt, while hanging upside down outside of a speeding airplane, and know he’ll soon be free and available to follow through on said threats. “He’s a man that provides, and provides, and provides,” scolds IMF chief, and possible double agent, John Brussel (Laurence Fishburne) after Hunt’s team botches the mission, “and he remains invisible; he’s the Goddamned Invisible Man.” This invisible man remains the target as the film skips around the globe, from Berlin to the Vatican City as Hunt and his team, including series regular Ving Rhames as Luther Strickell (in “24” terms, he’s Chloe to Ethan’s Jack), use everything from a secret computerized makeup compact to a rubber face and voice modification equipment to apprehend their target and decode the papers inside his leather briefcase, pointing to a doomsday device called the “Rabbit’s Foot”. What would super-agents do if there were never doomsday devices to rescue out of the hands of the bad guys? Save the President’s lost puppy? I don’t think so. The plot is simply procedural (eventually they even end up swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper in Shanghai), to launch one impressive, numbing action sequence after another, filled with millions of bullets, fireballs, helicopters, dead bad guys, bullet proof good guys, heroic rescues, near fatal escapes, and an epic struggle between villain and hero (especially when villain kidnaps hero’s beloved new wife) for world supremacy, and some kind of macho bragging rights. If the plot is nominal, and the dialogue is second rate (in one scene Hunt and his wife actually discuss the ever important issue of relationships and trust, mimicking the film’s primary filmic reference point, the superior comic-adventure “True Lies”), the action is what makes “Mission: Impossible III” worth the ticket price, and though Abrams has done better work before on television, especially his Emmy winning direction of “Lost’s” mesmerizing two-hour pilot, he’s smart enough to stage a chase scene and multiple explosions without it looking too unoriginal and cheesy. And let’s face it, as weird as Tom Cruise is in real life, he brings the goods to his action movies, and he’s right at home here in Ethan Hunt’s obsessed, unstoppable, superman persona. If pressed, I’d take Jack Bauer and “24” any day, but to kick start a slow movie year into a potentially exciting summer season, Cruise’s Hunt, and the combustible action of “M:I:III” will do fine, just don’t expect any kind of mental challenge, this is strict run-and-gun, and once you accept that, you’ll be good to go. “Mission: Impossible III” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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