Middle of the road

Rating: 5/10 (8 May 2006)

I'm not a huge fan of Tom Cruise, particularly in light of his recent limelight antics. I have to admit I was not too excited to see MI:3 at all.
On that note, I was pleasantly surprised. It was slightly less "Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise... imitating some sort of a character" than I expected. Cruise's characters never quite break too far from one another. But in this case, the character was shallow. So... no harm, no foul.
As others have mentioned, the plot seemed shallow to me. I think a large part of the problem lies in Hoffman's villain. He's simply not quite dark or deep enough to be believable to me to make this movie work correctly. The movie sets him out to be one of those "invisible" masterminds of the underworld, but we never truly see his underworld, nor his invisibility.
The other problem is with the Rabbit's Foot itself. Sure-- we get that it has a bio-hazard label on it. Which means it's probably some dirty bomb, in light of current political climate fears. But other than by name (and a visible image of the cannister), we don't know what the Rabbit's Foot is. Nor are we given a reason to care about its broader implications to mankind.
Overall, it was a popcorn flick. A harmless, kick back for an action movie type movie. Not that great, but not horrible, either.