The last mission? Don't think so...

Rating: 5/10 (18 June 2007)

It seems like Tom Cruise's been running all his life, or at least all this decade: "Mission Impossible II", "Vanilla Sky", "Minority Report", "Collateral", "War of the Worlds"And if that's not enough running, you should watch him in this film, the latest installment of the "Mission Impossible" franchise directed by J.J. Abrams where he plays the known agent Ethan Hunt and has to take care of another mission; he doesn't stop.
J.J. Abrams is the creator of TV's top series "Alias" and "Lost", but it seems his creativity ends up just about there. He's the guy who has made watching television a cinematographic experience these last few years, but a TV series is TV in the end. Of course we don't want to accept the difference, because it looks amazing. Well, "Mission Impossible III" also looks amazing; but it looks like TV.
However, that's not really an important thing, because the difference between television and cinema is getting smaller by the day. The issue is that this last 'mission' doesn't work as a whole picture. It has happened that franchises are ruined after the first filmI'm just thinking "Mission Impossible II" shouldn't have been made. Yes, John Woo directed it and the great Hans Zimmer put his own touch to the great Danny Elfman's iconic score.
Now the prominent Michael Giacchino has given a new energy to the score and it sounds greatAnd so what? I wrote that this is the latest installment because you never know if there's going to be another one; and the truth is they could do it any day if they do it like this. It has come to the point that any excuse worth enough to generate fabulous action scenes serves as what we commonly know as a 'plot'. And there goes the rest; by this I mean Abrams and his writers' intelligence.
The way I see it, this could have been a great mini-series of four chapters. It has four breathtaking action scenes and each one could have been the thrill of each one of the episodes. This is why movies run for two hours nowadays: because of the long eventful action scenes. We get those in television tooBut Cruise had to do it big time; on the big screen.
How can the guy pull "Collateral" and "Minority Report" and then this? The latter ones are also action movies, and he runs, but he delivers good performances, unlike here. It is quite embarrassing to watch him confront Philip Seymour Hoffman, to whom all the credit goes for creating one of the most memorable villains in recent years. There's not a sign of something coming from a cartoon in his performance, which he builds with admirable composure. Beside him, Cruise looks like the robot Keanu Reeves is so used to play.
I can't count the number of the underused actors found in the rest of the ensemble; you should watch it for yourselves. By the way, Ethan Hunt doesn't die, but you already knew that. I mean; what would "Die Hard" be with a dead Bruce Willis?