Frustrating and Annoying

Rating: 6/10 (10 May 2006)

The first three or four minutes of this movie promises something that should have set it far above the other two Mission Impossible films- a real sense of danger and loss. But as the movie goes on these promises become lost in a movie full of unnecessary twists and pointless plot lines in order to get to a happy ending. A shame really.
The plot revolves around Mr Ethan Hunt again, who is now settling down into the role of family man with his fiancée. Unfortunately this is all interrupted when one of his pupils is captured behind enemy lines by one Owen Davian- an arms dealer who is after something called the rabbit's foot. Unfortunately Ethan soon finds himself in the position of exchanging said rabbit's foot for his fiancée's life in a race against the clock.
The film is shot in all sorts of exotic locations and uses all sorts of whiz-bang gadgets, but really, there comes a point where whiz bang gadgets have to take a back seat. Admittedly there is an excellent sequence in the Vatican with the construction of one of the famous masks but otherwise the gadgets seem now to be standard fare.
Tom Cruise sleepwalks through the film on two cylinders, almost as if he's waiting for the paycheck. Much more convincing is Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian who acts Cruise off the screen in their scenes together and Simon Pegg who provides comic relief as the IT specialist back at HQ.
The fact of the matter is, that if the writers to the risk of actually perhaps going the extra mile and leaving the first sequence as it was ( I don't want to give too much away ) instead of tampering with it afterwards with what seemed like little more than a disclaimer, there could have been a good, maybe even a great movie here. Instead the last third of the movie, though throughly improved by the performances of Hoffman and Pegg, was basically wasted.