I hope Lost doesn't unfold as this one did.

Rating: 4/10 (23 May 2006)

Although I haven't been to the theatre for a while, I was more than willing to make an exception for M:I III for two reasons. Call me a teenager but I'm a sucker for Cruise on the big screen. Second, and more important, I was dying to see what the creator of my favourite new show Lost can do in Hollywood. Anyone who can come up with such a creative and gripping series is sure to dazzle in the theatre. So I went...
And god how I wish I'd stayed in...
The only impossible mission I could find was to transform such a lousy under-developed script into something even remotely entertaining. What's with the latest fad of starting the movie with the scene before the last? Quite simply, it made the first hour meaningless, because we knew the bad guy would eventually escape, that he'd get hold of Hunt's (Cruise) girl and threaten to shoot her (if not indeed shoot her!) if the whereabouts of the "Rabbit's Foot" is not revealed. Granted the scene is intense and well made, but it is one of the rare good scenes in the movie.
So Ethan Hunt is now in love and getting married to super hot nurse Julia (Monaghan  from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). He no longer works in the field and is instead training agents. Julia thinks he works for the department of transportation but starts to feel something's off when he keeps going away on conferences for a "few days". Hunt has actually taken on an assignment to track down agent Lindsey Farrell (Russell) who has been kidnapped by super evil Owen Davian, played eeringly well by Hoffman (from Capote). In fact, Davian is so evil that he places a nitroglycerin capsule inside a person's brain through the nose and activates it once they escape. A few minutes later, the capsule explodes and the victim dies immediately, like a robot that has been turned off. That was probably the only cool gadget in the entire movie. Well OK the other cool gadget was Cruise in a priest's cassock as he sneaks into the Vatican and does his stuff. Nice touch.
But seriously, the plot line is thin with hardly any action sequences worth enduring the cheesy scenes for. One memorable one I'd like to share is when Agent Declan (Meyers) and Agent Zhen (Maggie Q) are in the car waiting for Hunt to come out of a building. Zhen starts whispering something and Declan asks her what it was. "It's just a little prayer that I used to say to get my cat to come home." A very serious straight-faced Declan replies "Can you teach it to me?" If that's not vomit-inducing cheese I don't know what is.
Anyway, if this movie is any indication of how Lost is going to unfold, then I don't know if I'm gonna be able to watch Season 3... Who am I kidding? I know I will.