Mission the mark

Rating: 5/10 (16 May 2009)

I'm biased, me... I'm old enough to remember and revere the 60's original and better yet got to view them all again (and I do mean all) recently on a classic TV satellite channel, with the great cast of the ultra-cool Steven Hill, ultra-resourceful Martin Landau and ultra-beautiful Barbara Bain, in neat, intricately plotted story lines, wrapped up in 50 entertaining minutes. You were lucky in the TV show if a gun was shot in anger far less saw helicopters fly in and out of a jungle of wind-powered generators as "MI3" improbably starts. They even get the "Your mission, Jim..." prelude wrong by fatally delaying its entry and playing it completely wrong.
I actually have no problem with the re-launch of the franchise in the 90's and beyond and remember thrilling to the previous De Palma and John Woo-helmed predecessors, it's just that this third outing looks too often like a computer game converted into a movie (a la "Tomb Raider", "Resident Evil" and no doubt "Time Crisis" to come!) rather than the other way round and as well as re-hashing a lot of the stuff from numbers 1 & 2 (which means more face-morphing, base jumps et al.), it also cops from other high-adrenaline thrill-fests past and present. Most obvious is a bridge-sundering cataclysm last seen in "True Lies", but there are so many echoes of any other number of recent Bourne and Bond flicks that I stopped counting.
The best scenes reminded me of the TV series, notably a cleverly staged, slickly actioned kidnapping of Philip Seymour-Hoffman's master-villain Michael Davian (although when they morphed Cruise's face into Hoffman's he somehow seems to develop the latter's paunch too!) but there were too few of these. The rest is bluster, flashy but empty pyrotechnics on the ground and in the air, painfully corny lovey-dovey nonsense between Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his new missus ("On Her Majesty's Secret Service" anyone?) and the requisite empty buddy-buddy bonding between Cruise and the rest of his team.
And as for the acting, well Tom runs and runs and runs - more even than he did in "The Firm" and of course comes back from the dead at the end to save the world and his honeymoon. Hoffman is probably the best of the bunch, if still a lesser presence than Dougray Scott in MI2 while Simon Pegg gets a sub-Cleese/Dench cameo part as Cruise's nerdy tech-guy Benji (Benji !?!).
Don't get me wrong, the two hours watching-time went past quickly and I was nevr bored. However it all made for arather hollow by-rote experience. Time for Ethan and his crew to leave the field for better exponents of this particular art - I'm thinking of Mr Bourne and a certain Mr wayne in Gotham City. To paraphrase the old Bond song, somebody does it better...!