Good Night Mr Phelps

Rating: Null/10 (30 April 2006)

This is horrible. Seeing that the average rating on this one at the IMDb is 6.6 at time of writing lends much credence to the oft-held postulate that the planet is increasingly populated by morons.
Warrior god Xenu drops nuclear bombs in the volcanoes of the planet Earth only 75 million years ago in an attempt to cure his own civilisation of a slight issue with overpopulation - something on the order of a trillion gajillion zillion of them. This all makes perfect sense. And your mission, Tom, should you choose to accept it, is to go on screen in this shameless waste of a viable premise and make more of an ass out of yourself than even you had been capable of before.
You've done everything you could to get an Oscar short of administering group oral sex to the entire AMPAS, so you maybe better concentrate on the green stuff instead - and face the fact your esteemed colleagues just don't like you.
Watching Cruise go through the motions of being an action hero is pathetic - and then suddenly it dawns on you: this idiot is so crazy he really believes he's an action hero. He gets to be all the things he isn't in real life. This twit is long gone.
In fact, thinking about this - inadvertently thinking about this, it's impossible to avoid, what with all we know today about what a looney tune Cruise is - makes it impossible to take this sorry excuse for a movie seriously.
The original small screen formula is easy to research: it's listed here on the IMDb. Perhaps some of the IMDb's bumpkin reviewers would do themselves a service by reading up on it (if in fact they can read - this is open to debate, as we all know, as there is ample evidence they can neither type nor spell).
The only light in this movie (aside from the visual delight of Emmanuelle Beart) is Henry Czerny who gets kudos for again (as in Clear and Present Danger) getting the style of the slimy crook down pat. How Czerny does this I do not know: they don't scrape his face as with Le Chiffre - he's always given a robot look and still he can come off as totally threatening. If fact I might even be a bit wary of this bloke if I met him on the street - that's how well I think he does his part.
As for the rest of the movie, it's everything the critics said it was - and worse. Far far worse. It appeals only to people with an IQ below zero. Only to people whose brain cells work like amoebas and where Mother Nature is still waiting for that first cataclysmic split. There is no story - none; they dash the premise of the original to smithereens within minutes (leaving one to wonder why they wanted to grab the franchise in the first place) and the plot thereafter makes absolutely no sense at all. Worse, the special effects are horrendous. Cartoons do it better and are more realistic.
This is the movie, box office success or no, that finally convinced the world Tom Cruise is nuts. Totally nuts. That he chooses to go out into the world and promote his latest cash cow MI3 while his 'wife' is at home going through labour with her test tube baby is only more evidence that Hollywood have an incredibly unique and totally hopeless loser on their hands.
Good night Mr Phelps.