An End to Recent Stale Movies!!!

Rating: 9/10 (11 May 2006)

Mission Impossible III starts off differently than others in the series, beginning with one of the most agonizing, intense, best acted moments in the entire film. The first two minutes are just a sampling of the intensity, emotion, and awesomeness that's in store for the viewers.
Tom Cruise, whether you like the guy or not, makes amazing movies. Sure, he's not really different than any other character he's ever been in other films, but what J.J. Abrams does with the character of Ethan Hunt is what really drives the movie. Hunt is no longer your total hard-nosed, emotionally bland man that gets through his days one at a time. Now he's deeply in love (and a good performance by Cruise gives this impression), setting his sights on the future for the first time.
Phillip Seymore Hoffman's performance far out weighs Cruise's simple, if not cliché, character. Some argue that he barely has any screen time (which is very true), but look at the context of his character -- it was Laurence Fishburne that said Owen Davian (Hoffman's super evil personage) cannot be found. Do you think a man that can't be found is going to have a lot of time on screen? No, Hoffman gets an appropriate amount of time in the movie.
The action in the movie is simply brilliant. It's exactly what movie goers needed after such a horrible January-April of stale movies. Certain sequences don't work too well (the helicopter chase kind of seems ridiculous - and I think there were massive scaling problems in the CGI; Abrams abused Ethan's drop-inches-from-the-ground maneuver), and some sequences should have been included. Throughout the entire movie, Ethan and his team went through their objectives in stylish fashion, but when it came to the ONE IMPOSSIBLE MISSION in the film (the insane infiltration into the Shanghai Military Complex), Abrams disturbingly chose to emit all of what went on within the building and instead focused on the non-active team members waiting to evac once Ethan returned to the outside world! That's almost insulting! This is Mission Impossible, let's see the Impossible Mission! Aside from that one HUGE complaint, the rest of the film was sensational. Favorite moments include (and I'll keep this spoiler free): Ethan's interrogation aboard the cargo plane, the entire Vatican City mission, and of course, the famous bridge sequence.
In the end, Abrams entry into the MI series is much more deserving of better reviews than what it's been getting. He does a number of things that were desperately needed in MI2 (team-focused missions, personal interactions between characters, and more flexible acting from Cruise). And I appreciated his effort in making IMF a part of the U.S. government instead of just implied that its kind of "there". Mission Impossible III is one heck of a movie. It's intense, emotional, and exhausting - and it's a great way to start off the summer lineup.