Child of Raiders

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 2006)

I have to hand it to MI3: It delivers nonstop action and the kind of over-hyped "intense" moments of which Hollywood builds prefab popcorn movies with sleep-walking regularity. I find no plot holes to carp about. In fact, the film is to be commended for not letting anything so burdensome as a plot get in its way. Almost every second of screen time is given to explosions and athletic stunts and sweaty last second cliffhanging saves that tax physics and credulity to the tensile snapping point.
This sort of film is the logical conclusion of a development in film-making begun with Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1980. If you recall that film from the time of its release, you know exactly what I mean. It was next generation Hitchcock that built a celluloid shrine to one single object, the all stops pulled set piece. That single object had but one purpose, for these fan boy plunderers of the Hitchcock legacy: To stagger you under the one-two gut-punch of crazy plot revelation AND slick bit of film-making, the FX or and the way a scene was shot and assembled. Raiders and its legion of imitators took the Statue of Liberty scene from Saboteur, the Mt Rushmore scene from North by Northwest and the Merry Go Round scene from Strangers on a Train as their inspiration and rolled one of these magical film instants out every 7 minutes of screen time.
Inflation being what it is, the time between big moments has narrowed to more like every 2 minutes. And the actions which seemed far fetched in Raiders -- Indi being dragged top- speed under a truck down a gravel road, the face off in the pit of a thousand million snakes, the final blowout confrontation between supernatural forces and the bad guys -- are tamed by comparison with the downright giddy visual hyperbole by the time we get to the MI franchise. I don't exactly regret that Raiders ever happened; it was a rousing, loving, and perhaps above all, a history-savvy homage to a certain type of film moment. But what has happened to Hollywood since then is hard not to view with regret. Still, it's not Spielberg's fault that his palatable take on Hitchcock's deft touches has evolved from slightly overwrought parody to witless and ham-handed overkill.
The story is-- let's be generous -- strikingly simple: The bad guy who wants the Mcguffin back gets to Cruise's squeeze and, holding her captive, is able to make him dance -- which in this case means make him deliver the Mcguffin back home. How all this happens, in terms of filmed language and gestalt, makes the cartoon caffeine cinema of Michael Bay look like the glacial floe of Robert Bresson's oeuvre. If I have seen more shaking camera, strobing light and one second edits, I'm not sure where.
Maybe because I searched for something as old school as the faint must of "literary quality" to the script (silly me), my favorite MI3 bit is what you could call a storytelling conceit. It isn't original. It's the Citizen Kane gambit of beginning with the end, flashing back, and progressing to the same point by film's end. They put a surprise twist to this gambit, but that isn't really very original either (sort of like the old TV series or Wild Wild West). So, um, forget the search for literary quality here.
I give the film 5 stars of 10.