Every mission's impossible when you're an Oompa Loompa

Rating: Null/10 (24 November 2008)

I never watch an action movie unless I'm sure the lead hero can kick my ass.
Tom Cruise...all nine inches of him...CAN NOT kick my ass. He is NOT an action hero. He is a midget. Can midget's be action heroes? Of course. I'm not prejudiced against the vertically challenged. But to be an action hero midget, you've got to be more than a midget. You've got to also be an action hero. And Tom Cruise isn't an action hero. He's just a goofy little midget.
Clint Eastwood can kick my ass. Bruce Willis can kick my ass. Sigourney Weaver can kick my ass. Even Joe Pesci, that quasi-midget bumbling bandit from "Home Alone" 1 and 2, can kick my ass. They are true action heroes. They destroy you with their deadly silence and sudden flashes of violence.
But Tom Cruise is no action hero. Action heroes don't work in teams. They don't use words like "mission impossible" and they don't hang upside down from ceilings like overdressed acrobats.
A common misconception is that action heroes must do action. No. A true action hero prides himself in in-action. Clint Eastwood roams his films silently and slowly. But when his hands do finally drift toward their holsters, ten people die, ten seconds later. Do the math. Ten corpses in ten seconds. Sixty corpses in one minute. Thirty six hundred in one hour. 86400 deaths per day. Clint Eastwood could kill the population of China in less than a year.
It took Tom Cruise half an hour to kill 12 people in "Mission Impossible 2". It took him twenty minutes to kill 2 villains during the final showdown of "Mission Impossible 1". These are clearly not the mortality rates of an action hero.
But to make things worse, "Mission Impossible 3" is about Tom Cruise's wife getting kidnapped. His wife? Domestic drama does not belong in the "Mission Impossible" series. If I wanted to watch a movie about women and midgets I'd watch...I don't know, "Little Women".
What's Ethan Hunt doing in a romantic relationship anyway? Action heroes only have one relationship. The relationship between them and death!
Sigourney Weaver spent 4 movies kicking alien butt, but I didn't see her begging for a husband. Charles Brosnan didn't moan about his dead wife whilst mercilessly gunning down punks.
To be a true action hero, you've got to be a cocktail of quick carnage and quiet wisdom. You've also got to have no human attachments. From the wise Japanese samurai of "Yojimbo", to Bruce Willis' John Mclane in the "Die Hard trilogy", true action heroes all have one thing in common: they're loners.
Clint Eastwood don't need no stinkin' sidekick. Lee Van Cleef always rides alone and Rambo didn't even bother to learn English. Who's he gonna talk to? His guns? Even John McClane, the ironic action hero of the 90's, kills a skyscraper full of terrorists just so he can tell his wife he wants a divorce. That is true manliness.
But nah, the golden age of the action hero is dead. These days we got pretty boys like Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise jumping around like little sissy girls on wires. Makes me wanna vomit sawdust.
4/10 - This is one big ego project. Aside from the pre-credit sequence, the whole film is cliché.