Not impossible to enjoy

Rating: Null/10 (6 May 2006)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to suspend credibility and just enjoy the ride. It might help if you had previously had a minor explosion in your brain, perhaps utilising a miniature version of a device twice blown up the noses of Impossible Missions Force agents in "M:i 2". The opening is cracking and totally attention-grabbing and the action jumps from Berlin to Rome to Shanghai with plenty of thrills and spills, although the narrative is banal when it is not confusing and the ending is limp.
Directed and partly written by J J Abrams (who has given us such fun and fascination in the television series "Lost"), there's nothing really new here and at times it's rather bewildering (indeed we never find out what the "rabbit's foot" is and why anyone would want to die for it) but, as the first summer blockbuster of 2006, it's going to win a decent return on its investment.
As agent Ethan Hawke, Tom Cruise still looks good in the part, a decade after he first made it his own, and hopefully this movie will remind his fans that there is more to the man than mad protestations of love and weird views inspired by Scientology. If he can learn to keep his mouth shut off-screen and pick more roles like "Magnolia" and "Collateral", he still has a future.