Mission: Impossible III (Abrams, 2006)

“Mission: Impossible III” doesn’t waste any time with pleasantries. As the film opens, we are immediately thrust, unprepared, into the action. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is strapped to a barber chair, his arms and legs bound. His face is beaten and bloodied; his skin is clammy with sweat. His wild, misted eyes are staring at someone off-screen.

“Where is the rabbit’s foot?”

It’s Owen Davian (played by the brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman, a far cry from last year’s “Capote”), the suave and ruthless villain of the film. He’s holding a gun to the brunette head of Hunt’s pretty new wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), his face placid as he stares Hunt down. And then he starts counting.

“One …”

Ethan Hunt, secret agent extraordinaire, has returned for the third installment of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise – but this time, it’s personal. Davian, an arms-dealer whom Hunt failed to capture in the first act, has nabbed sweet young Julia (whose disturbing resemblance to Katie Holmes did not go unnoticed by me) and run off to Shanghai with her. If Hunt doesn’t retrieve the “rabbit’s foot” within 48 hours, he will find himself suddenly single. This gets Hunt all misty-eyed and angry (oh, Tom Cruise is so good at being misty-eyed), and it really pisses him off when he learns that his own agency, the IMF (Impossible Missions Force), might be involved – specifically his superior (Laurence Fishburn).

“Mission: Impossible III” is a vastly different film than its predecessors – chief reason being its direction by television big-shot J.J. Abrams of “Alias” and “24” fame. I’m hesitant to say that the action in this installment is realistic, but the stunts might as well have been choreographed by Newton himself as compared to the campy car chases and fight scenes of “Mission: Impossible” and “Mission: Impossible II.”

The film hasn’t strayed too far from its roots; the ridiculous face masks have returned for a third run (hey, they didn’t work in the first two films, why shouldn’t we use them here?), and Abrams has decided to stick with the obligatory “twist” at the climax of the movie involving the masks. Though cool in theory, the face masks just come off as moronic and corny. Yes, Tom Cruise is wearing a Philip Seymour Hoffman mask now – but where did he get those extra pounds? No disrespect to Hoffman, but he doesn’t exactly have Cruise’s lean physique. The masks succeed only in digging a few more deep holes into the Swiss-cheese surface of the plot.
But it’s not like the plot is why you’re watching this movie in the first place, and the fast-paced action and chase sequences more than make up for any misgivings in the story.

In one spectacularly intense scene, a jet and a helicopter full of Davian’s men attack a bridge – very similar to the one in “True Lies,” actually – on which Hunt and his team are traveling in a convoy, detained Davian in tow. Cars explode, portions of the bridge collapse and Hunt and his team are forced to play medic to the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. The scene is fantastically paced. We’re finally coming out of the “slow the action down, let the audience take it in” stage that films like “The Matrix” put us in six years ago, and we’re returning to the “give it to the audience fast, fast, fast – don’t give them time to recover!” method of filmmaking.

There’s a shot – you’ve probably seen it in the trailers – where Hunt is bolting across the bridge. A missile decimates the vehicle behind him, and the force of the explosion flings him into a nearby car like a rag doll, shattering the windows. Then a jet rockets past the frame, almost too fast for the eye to detect, and Hunt is on the ground, prone and covered in shards of glass. It all happens in a span of about two-and-a-half seconds, and it’s fantastic. No slow-motion for this mission, just fast-as-all-hell intensity.

Other insane action scenes include a rescue mission, an infiltration of the Vatican in Rome, a skyscraper base-jump, and a hectic chase and fist-fight in Shanghai. The film isn’t lacking in thrills by any means, and the tone is one of danger and espionage, as opposed to a focus on crazy-fast motorcycles and death-defying stunts (“Mission: Impossible II,” shame on you).

Though the film has its holes, though Hoffman’s villain is criminally underused and even though we never learn exactly what the “rabbit’s foot” actually is (an excellent case of a MacGuffin – a plot device that creates motivation for the characters, but doesn’t add any relevance to the story), it takes a lot of hard work not to enjoy “Mission: Impossible III.”

The Final Verdict: 7/10