Mission Ridiculous

Rating: 3/10 (8 May 2006)

When you go to see a Mission: Impossible movie, you have a certain set of expectations set by the others that have come before it. Primarily, that there will be espionage and intrigue, like on the television series, and that there will be plenty of cool action pieces, such as the previous two films. And in it's own unique way, Mission: Impossible 3, or the extremely marketable and radical M:i:III, as it likes to be called, fails all of the expectations it builds and neglects to blow up.
Ethan Hunt, after two movies full of explosions, double crosses, and plenty of high tech gadgets, has decided to settle down and start a family with the cute and uninteresting Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who is apparently appealing because she both Trusts Him and Is Concerned. Having found happiness, Hunt is immediately contacted by an IMF liaison to meet with him at a nearby 7-Eleven, where they talk shop while browsing over some Ritz crackers and Oreos. Hunt's student, Lindsey Ferris, has been captured and is being held behind enemy lines! However, Hunt is out of the game, so he grabs a candy bar and heads out the door, but not before grabbing the secret message hidden in the Kodak disposable camera on the way.
What follows is a quickly edited but slowly paced romp across the world to find The Rabbit's Foot, a macguffin of supposedly destructive potential that everyone under the sun wants for various reasons. Bad guy Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) wants it to sell to the Middle East, because that would be appropriately evil, and John Brassel (Laurence Fishburne) of the Impossible Mission Force wants it because without it, we wouldn't have a plot.
The race to get the Rabbit's Foot first leads us on a variety of high tech capers, from storming office buildings in Japan, to raiding the Vatican on a kidnapping mission, and everything in between. Many of these capers all involve seemingly cool elements from the previous films, such as Tom Cruise repelling down on a wire and landing inches above the floor (which happens twice in this movie), to Cruise leaping out of a shattered office building window and pulling his parachute to glide to safety (which we unfortunately only get to see once). Everything else is your standard ultra techie and unrealistic heist crap, with characters bypassing dozens of elaborate security systems with relative ease and little excitement. Gee, ever wonder for a moment if something will go wrong with their plan? Of course not! This is Tom Cruise we are talking about here! Tom is also joined by Mission: Impossible regular Ving Rhames, who spends the entire movie lecturing Hunt about why he shouldn't be in a relationship with someone. I kept hoping he'd spit out another classic line, like "That punk put a hole in my Versace!" but no dice. Cruise and Rhames are also joined by two extra team mates, who serve no real purpose. Each of them get an obligatory Character Development Scene in order to distinguish them from flat, two dimension characters, which they clearly are not.
But the really stand out performance in this movie belongs solely to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is trying his hardest throughout the film to flush his Oscar straight down the toilet. Hoffman wanders the film with a drunken expression that somehow fails to emote Evil Murderous Bad Guy. The only time he really seems to show his character is during the scene in the previews, where he threatens to kill Hunt, murder his wife, shoot his dog, pee on his rug, and trample his fish. That being done, he immediately hits up the hash again, and just stares blankly as the rest of the movie passes him by.
I honestly don't recommend this movie at all. The set pieces are uninteresting, the plot is uninspired to say the least, and the action is fundamentally boring. There is not a single scene in the film to get your blood pumping and the adrenaline flowing. I literally walked out of the film at one point to get a glass of ice from the concession stand, simply so I could witness something engaging going on, such as solid dialog ("Can I have some ice?" "Sure.") and a reasonable conclusion ("Here you go."). While I'm sure an audience for this film exists, I highly recommend renting a better spy thriller, like say, Agent Cody Banks, rather than giving Mission: Ridiculous a try.