Another thrilling impossible mission movie.

Rating: Null/10 (2 November 2006)

I am old enough that I was a fan of the old "Mission Impossible" TV series. And, while the movies are decidedly different in tone and style, the same "impossible" missions challenge the team. Someone once said that it wasn't believable, that the team could undertake all those seemingly impossible missions and still survive. My response was, and still is, "They only film the ones where the team succeeds. The ones where they get killed are not told." That's because it is all fiction anyway.
This installment -- MI:3 -- has several impossible missions. The movie actually starts near the end, with Ethan (Cruise) tied up and the bad guys, led by Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), are threatening to shoot his also tied up fiancée Julia (Michelle Monaghan) unless he tells them where the mysterious "rabbit's foot" is. We pick that scene up again at the end, but most of the movie is told in flashback form.
The movie has a somewhat low rating, maybe because of the bad publicity its star has had over his romance with Katie Holmes, jumping on Oprah's couch and things like that. But it in fact is an exciting, well-crafted movie which held my interest for its 2 hours running time.
SPOILERS FOLLOW. Cute Kerri Russell as an IMF operative gets killed off early. Ethan leads a rescue, in Germany, which is successful, but she dies seconds before they can electrically disarm a small explosive device implanted into her head via her nasal passage by the bad guys. At the end of the movie, right after Ethan rescues his fiancée, he has a similar device in his head, he uses an electrical shock to neutralize it, his fiancée, a nurse, manages to bring him back from death using CPR.
One mission is the capture the bad guy, Davian, when they find from a secret email that he will be in Vatican City for an event. Ethan puts on a molded Davian mask and they kidnap him, only to be ambushed later on a bridge back in the US. Part of the drama is trying to figure out which IMF insider is working with Davian.
There is another mission in China where the mysterious "rabbit's foot" is retrieved. But an actual synopsis of the movie is not that important. It is simply a modern thriller, very well done.