I Remembered It Being Better

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2017)

Continuing my plan to watch every Tom Cruise movie in order, I come to Mission Impossible 3 (2006)
Plot In A Paragraph: Agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) comes into conflict with a dangerous and sadistic arms dealer (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who threatens his life and his fianceé in response.
This is the directorial debut of J.J. Abrams and was released at a time when Cruise was still being ridiculed for jumping on Oprah's sofa when promoting War Of The Worlds.
I remember really liking this when it was released, thinking it brought the franchise (and ended it) on the right track. A really enjoyable popcorn flick is how I remembered it!! Watching it now I was disappointed in it, and found myself playing with my phone in several occasions. Is it silly to be disappointed in a pop corn flick??
The movie does a lot of things right, but it does nearly as many things wrong. I'll start with what I liked first. Right at the top of the list by a mile is a surprisingly intimidating Philip Seymour Hoffman. Owen Davian isn't the usual lunatic or a cultured villain. He's a deadly serious man who has no problems with killing anyone who gets in his way or those that let him down. Cruise's Ethan Hunt is a bit more human this time round, Laurence Fishburne is decent in his M like role and Simon Pegg is equally fun in his Q type role. The movie opens with a great, intense two-minute pre-credits scene.
Sadly the Bond-like pre credits sequence is so intense, a lot of what follows fella flatter, as we wait to catch up to that scene. The latex face device from the first two movies is still being used and despite a lot actions set pieces it lacks excitement.
It's better than the second one, but not as good as the first. Overall it's nothing more than a routine action movie, when I remembered much more.
I think Cruise's reputation at the time probably hurt this at the box office, as it finished the 14th highest grossing movie of the year, with a domestic gross of $134 million.