Kept me awake for a couple of hours

Rating: 2/10 (11 June 2006)

If you like action then you will like this, but if you appreciate any sort of plot then you might just have a hollow laugh.
In the same vein as the '24' series, Cruise has a ludicrously small amount of time in which to achieve more than one impossible task. He is indestructible.
However it is not clear why he does any of these things. We know there is something very dangerous 'a Rabbit's Foot' and an ultra baddie to be dealt with, but at the end of the film we still do not know much more about these things - and find at the end that we don't really care either. Anyway - he was never going to fail was he? So we have just a sequence of actions that do nothing much to stir the blood as we are given no connection to the characters or their reasons. This is less than a Bond film and might as well be a Superman or Batman one. But I remember the original Mission Impossible TV series to be far more believable, the tension to be greater, the gadgets and action to be far more ingenuous and less reliant on guns. Maybe this is just the imperfection of memory, but at least that is how I would like Mission Impossible to be.
On a particular point I object to its use of Shanghai as pure backdrop. In fact Cruise's fall from the high building is truly impossible as the building is in LuJiaZhui in PuDong, east of the HuangPu that divides the city, but he hits the ground in PuXi (Yan'An Road?), west of the river. But that is detail, and maybe we shouldn't be worried about such petty detail in a film that suspends belief everywhere else.
So at the end - there is no point at all to watch this movie. It is purely cinematic wallpaper, eye candy for grown infants.