Movie Reviews - Mission Impossible 3 (sorry, MI3)

I find the whole Mission Impossible franchise a bit baffling sometimes. I remember seeing the first one and thinking that it was the greatest thing since plain bread (it's a scottish thing, a toast experience you must try at some point!). The pace of the film, the stunts and the cast were amazing. I mean, killing off Kirsten Scott Thomas and Emilio Estevez in the first sequence just set the whole story alight.

Then, we got the super stylised MI2. Until that point I loved Mission Impossible and I loved John Woo (especially Face Off) so surely the two together just made perfect sense? Well, it was just one of these things that didn't work out. The story was pretty dull, the overuse of slow motion was pretty nauseous, as was the overuse of Dougray Scott!

When it comes to MI3, I think it kind of fits in somewhere between the two. Though it certainly doesn't scale the heights of the first movie, it's no where near as bad as the second one. Add to this a pretty good bad guy performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman and you get a fairly average film that'll keep you reasonably well enertained between laughing at the "impossibility" of some of the senarios and some of the incredibly corny lines (look out for "humpty dumpty sat on a wall") all of which are funnily enough delivered by Mr Cruise.

The thing that worries me the most about the film industry these days is that Tom Cruise isn't Ethan Hunt in this film, he's Tom Cruise. Is it not one of the basics of acting that you should be someone else on screen? Guys like Philip Seymour Hoffman are the real cream of the cinema crop. I don't know who he is in real life, I don't care! All I know is that whether it's Davian in this film or Capote, he is the character, we believe it, there is no Philip Seymour Hoffman. As great as their contributions have been in the past, Pacino and De Niro should never make a film again as they can no longer become anyone else.

Cruise's best performances in my opinion were in Magnolia, Interview with the Vampire, The Colour of Money and Born on the 4th of July. All of these performances show a slightly pathetic or tragic character to some extent. If a good director could grab him by the scruff of the neck and turn him into a right nasty or pathetic piece of work on screen and take a supporting role, I still think he'd have a chance of winning an Oscar. Otherwise, I guess there's always MI4 or even Top Gun 2 to look forward to...