Decent action movie, but nothing special

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2006)

It seems Hollywood is completely out of sync with what people are looking for in a movie lately. This movie gets higher marks just for being something that I can sit through without falling asleep or shaking my head in disgust as some social agenda is being crammed down my throat.
MI-III is a decent action movie with pretty good pacing. The story was a little shallow and cliché but was decent entertainment (at least compared with the junk that has been out there lately).
Ethan Hunt is trying to settle down and take it easy, but gets called in to help one of his protégés who has been captured. From there we had several infiltrations into impenetrable locations. Throw in the girlfriend has to be saved and a Benedict Arnold in the organization and you pretty much have the story.
Many, many action scenes with a few story scenes. The story scenes were good, but were too few. There should have been more character building. They had some interesting characters, but they didn't go deep enough in the character building for me to really care about them.
The movie didn't get political, but did have one allusion near the end where the Benedict Arnold character said that they could use this as an excuse to invade a middle eastern country and start building infrastructure.... frankly this kind of passive Iraq war bashing gets on my nerves.... but it was a very minor line, so if this bugs you don't let it stop you from seeing the movie.
All-in-all, it was an action movie that can entertain, but was nothing special.