Do Not Accept This Mission

Rating: 10/10 (5 May 2006)

superstar Tom Cruise puts his perennially adolescent persona to the latest live action video game, Mission: Impossible III, and comes up with another non-stop assault on the senses.
Designed to promote Cruise, Mission: Impossible III is standard action stuff from beginning to end. Cars blow up, rockets scream toward their target and a tormented protagonistCruise in his third outingbounces around as if he is made of rubber.
Cruise's retired agent Ethan, now a trainer, is in love with a young woman which is like watching a soda pop commercial. It's a choppy introduction to the theme, if one can call it that, that work and love can co-exist.
During a party to celebrate the couple's union, Cruise is beckoned to a convenience store, where he meets his boss (Billy Crudup). His mission: rescue a kidnapped female agent (Keri Russell, watchable as always) whom he trained. She's being held by Team Villain, led by Philip Seymour Hoffman in his first role since winning the Oscar for Capote.
Action is admittedly not this writer's favorite genre and, having happily avoided seeing the first two in this franchise, very loosely based on a suspenseful TV drama, Mission: Impossible III was not a top choice. That said, it is not as terrible as was expected. For those who prefer action devoid of thought, it is downright acceptable.
As the ear-splitting intervention unfolds in Berlin, Cruise loses an agent, whose flat-lined facial expression haunts him. He attends the funeral, flashes back and prepares for the next jaunt, all while trying to prove to his third-time cohort, Ving Rhames, that marriage can be compatible with career. Two others on the team, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and someone named Maggie Q, play along purely for show. Nothing lasts much longer than a couple of seconds.
Next stop, the Vatican, which is believable if you accept that technology can conjure a perfect likeness of another human beingvoice, hair and facein under a few minutes. Whizzing by to avoid even a nanosecond of scrutiny, this section is the most thrilling, though it is completely implausible, with a chi-chi cocktail party inside the Vatican, manholes, men's rooms and, naturally, a briefcase. This time, Cruise gets the job done.
He inexplicably loses his temper, presumably tossing out ten years of Impossible Mission Force (IMF) training in an embarrassingly histrionic display in which his identity becomes known to Hoffman's snide villain. Faster than you can say True Lies, a bridge is ambushed, the wife is taken captive and it's off to China to watch Cruise do his robotic running like he did in his last picture, the unbearable War of the Worlds.
As he did in that movie, Cruise wells up repeatedly, befitting the picture's dominant emotion: chronic fear. Cruise does his regular routine of facial expressions and posturescocky, intense, victimizedand includes the Risky Business sunglasses.
The action, something to do with a conspiracy involving Hoffman's weapons dealer, is too quick, jerky and hard to follow, heavy on close-ups, with plot and character development in low gear and hokey dialog that doesn't match. But the big caboodle bumps and bustles. It's not here to make sense.
As the top IMF dude Laurence Fishburne
adds stature and the cast on screen for what feels like eight minutes per actor, enters and exits on cue. The movie, pumped, zipped and ready to ship, belongs to Cruise, still filling the screen with his practiced smirk and making all the right moves in the wrong direction.