More in the spirit than MI2, but still not quite there.

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2006)

In the spirit of the original television series - and in a large part, the first movie - the ideal Mission Impossible movie should be a combination of the clockwork precision of a perfectly planned Rube Goldberg machine with the ensemble panache of a Magnificent Seven movie. Each character should be compelling and yet together they should fit into a beautifully complex machine whose purpose will only be revealed when complete.
Does this movie measure up to such a standard?
Definitely more so than the grotesquely over-the-top solo Tom Cruise outing Mission Impossible II (which tried all too hard to change the franchise into what it was never intended to be - a modern Bond movie), but still sadly deficient of the goal. Oddly enough, modern thievery movies like Ocean's Eleven succeed precisely where modern M:I films fail, and I'll say why. Director J.J.Abrams should understand this point well, being the creator of Alias - a spy franchise that prominently features complex "Rambaldi" devices as part of their plot. Sadly, even his effort here seems mediocre at best.
An analogy should illustrate my point: Imagine the perfectly constructed antique clockwork that should be the ideal Mission Impossible film. Each piece of the plot, each character, each discovery - all these work together, reinforce each other in resonant harmony towards a greater goal that necessarily involves each component part. Now, in comparison MI:III stands like a collection of wind-up toys (being each momentarily dazzling - but more often than not superfluous - action-spy sequence) tossed in a bucket together (the overall plot), rattling against one another until one is finally tossed out of the bucket (the climax). The secondary characters (and they are oh-so secondary) largely unoriginal - with the possible exception of Maggie Q's spystress Zhen Lei - in their creation, ripped out of previous Mission Impossible films and episodes of Alias. Am I the only person that didn't constantly see flashes of Alias everywhere in this film - especially in the resident Simon Pegg's (Shaun of the Dead, great cameo) techno-geek Benji vs. Kevin Weisman's Marshall? To top it off, the secondary characters are sadly underdeveloped and underutilized in exchange for Tom Cruise screen time. They never have the screen time to pick up "cool" factors of their own as in a Magnificent Seven film (or Ocean's Eleven), let alone unique personalities, or even well-defined roles to explain their individual functions in the spy group. The team members' functions are never completely clear-cut in this film whereas in the original series and the first film, each team member had a very specific function - as a specific cog in the mission, if you will - that they played out to the letter towards the greater goal of the overall mission plan. More often than not, most of the "missions" of this film had little planning at all - shocking for a MI film - and seemed more to be frenetic collections of things going wrong (which may or may not reflect the mentality of its star). The so-called "ensemble" action sequences - while more so than in MI:II - are so focused upon Tom Cruise's acrobatics that they are less so ensemble and more so "Tom Cruise-support". The Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt & Katie Holmes look-alike fiancée romantic subplot is both unnecessary and without enough substance to be even deserving of the moniker 'subplot'. It seems that the film is filled with failed flashback attempts at emotional expression. However, you never really know any of the characters well enough to feel any emotion, and none are adequately developed so as to be compelling. For the most part, the acting of the leads is as flat, cold, and unastounding as the spy roles they portray. There is simply a lack of recognition as to what is important in a MI film. Finally, events simply happen in this film like a mediocre video game - there is no mystery revealed, no conspiring of events, no overall culmination of plot, no build-up to the climax. It is ironic that amidst all this spectacular action, there is simply no suspense - dramatic or otherwise. It is all a wash of ephemeral flashes in which little, if anything, has genuine significance.
It is little wonder that an antique clockwork is infinitely more valuable than the bucket of wind-up toys.
A side note - I often get Billy Crudup (Musgrave) confused with Firefly's Sean Maher - went through the entire film thinking how nice it was to some of the Firefly cast getting new work. Another side note: incidentally, Maggie Q (or Maggie Quigley) is actually not Chinese at all in any part, but half Vietnamese and half Polish/Irish American, raised in Hawaii and having learned Cantonese in Hong Kong through modeling/acting roles there (some with Jackie Chan).