hot damn!

Rating: 8/10 (30 November 2006)

Even though his private life has recently overshadowed his professional life, Tom Cruise is back with a vengeance as superhuman spy Ethan Hunt for the third outing of the "Mission: Impossible" series. When the road to a film's production has as many potholes as this one, viewers tend to be highly skeptical of the final product. Instead of becoming a half-rate sequel, "Mission: Impossible III" takes the best strengths of the "M:I" series, the panache of the James Bond series, character and story suggestions from the Bourne series, and rolls them all into a non-stop action thrill ride with a surprisingly discernible plot line.
Ethan heads back into action when an IMF agent goes missing, all the while attempting to keep his true profession secret from his girlfriend. He comes face-to-face, in more ways than one, with a highly calculating and clever adversary played with style by the dependable Philip Seymour Hoffman. His scenes are brief, but the impressions they leave on the film are immense. Nonetheless this is still a Tom Cruise vehicle, as shaped through the eyes of TV's J.J. Abrams. He may be raking in the gold with "Lost", but his directing chops for this sort of material comes straight from "Alias".
There were six years between the second and third "Mission: Impossible" films, and the resulting production was well worth the wait. It's an amazingly fast-paced, tightly edited, espionage thriller that skates from one smart set piece to the next with a little bit of class and a little bit of charm.