My Review, Should You Choose to Accept It

This past weekend, the J.J. Abrams factor won out over all the other factors, and I saw Mission: Impossible III. On just about every level I can think of, I'd rank it "good, but not great."

In the plus column, it played a lot more like "Mission: Impossible" (the original TV show) than either of the previous films. By that I mean that my conception of the old show, admittedly based on very limited exposure to it, is that a team of people was having to work together to pull off heists and capers from week to week. It was not "lone wolf," James Bond type of stuff. Which is what made me sort of wishy-washy about film one (it had moments of good group heistedness, but an uncomfortably high number of "look at me, I'm the big summer action hero" moments for Tom Cruise as well), and made me totally despise film two (which seemed to make no effort at being anything but a "single star action vehicle"). MI3 actually had more good "team efforts" going on in it than both its predecessors combined.

But in a way, this almost worked to its detriment... because J.J. Abrams has had his show Alias on the air for five years now, and they've spent all that time mining that same formula -- a team of agents working together to pull off heists and capers. In other words, there were times that MI3 played too much like an episode of Alias, though with a less appealing lead character. There were even a few new characters introduced in this film that were essentially carbon copies of characters on Alias. An awkward lab tech, for example, was so much "Marshall Flinkman," they should have just got Kevin Weisman to play the role.

I can praise Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the best thing about the movie, though. He kicks ass in this film. He makes a chilling, creepy bad guy.

And though it's not really directly about this movie, I can also praise digital projection. I happened to catch MI3 at a theater with a digital projector. Holy crap, is that good stuff. Sharp, vivid, unblemished. Basically, compare a top end plasma screen television set to a five-year-old picture tube set, and that's about the type of difference in quality we're talking. Simply amazing. So incredible, in fact, that I actually got excited about the Superman trailer that ran before the film. I've been deep in the land of "so what" about there being a new Superman movie at every step of the way, through all the buzz, all the magazine articles, and through that first teaser trailer. But when I saw this new trailer, projected digitally on this big screen -- I can't deny, I sat up in my seat.

But back to Mission: Impossible 3. It might rate a B, but I'm knocking my rating down to B- for it being somewhat derivative. I'd rather J.J. Abrams have hung out around the Alias set more and made it not suck so bad for last year-and-a-half rather than taken off to make this movie.