Mission: Failed...

Rating: 3/10 (1 March 2007)

I suppose (continuing on the whole humorless pun thing) it's not 'Mission: Interesting III' or 'Mission: Exciting III' or even 'Mission: Enjoyable III'. No, it's 'Mission: Impossible III', a film - like its predecessors - with enough star power to sink 'Titanic' and a budget greater than that of the GDP of most second-world nations.
And it's not really interesting. Or enjoyable. It's like a less interesting version of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 'Eraser', or a Steven Seagal film without Steven Seagal. We have a WMD (I suppose it's a WMD...it could be a very flash martini shaker for all I we're told...), a kidnapped fiancé (the staple of a few Jean-Claude van Damme films funnily enough, apart from the, '...they killed his family...now he's OUT FOR REVENGE!!!' which is the staple of all the other JCVD films...), crooks in the agency (wasn't that in 'xXx: State of the Union'?) and all sort of useless, boring action scenes and gloss special effect that are...amazingly...used as FILLER between the even more useless, uninteresting character building scenes. And the worse part is, after plodding along for all this amount of time, it seems as if the directed check his watch and though, "Ooh, better rap this up!" and thought up some gimmicky way of ending it all (and THANK GOD it's not longer than two hours like 'M:I 2').
Overall: A B-grade script (Seagal would probably jump at it, actually), A-grade 'talent' (Oxymoron #1,156) and some of the most boring, 'seen-it-a-hundred-times-before' action sequences ever filmed.
If you're looking for an engaging, exciting and CLEVER (as CLEVER as action/thrillers are in this day and age) piece of entertainment, forget this - and rent Keifer Sutherland's '24'. You'll thank me later...