A little schizophrenic about this one....

Rating: 6/10 (3 May 2006)

Mission Impossible 3's trailers left me slobbering at the mouth. Hoffman seemed like a cunning, conniving (and emotionally intense) villain... juicy, given how well he does in other roles. There was the love interest which seemed to look credible in the few shots that it's presented... The action looked intense, and there was the good ol' music theme.
What could go wrong? Well, first of all, I felt that it did go wrong. Secondly, all the cool bits in the trailer were the problems in the film. The first half hour shows so much of Ethan maintaining his double life with his fiancée, that I just wanted it to continue. There are some good scenes for setting up later events, but there's just too much there. The romance also could have been toned down.
I normally like a movie to get into the details about characters and relationships, but it felt inappropriate here. Mission Impossible should be about Ethan Hunt completing an impossible mission, but it gets bogged down by the exposition. If it were released under a non-franchise name, it would probably have gone down better with me.
Another detractor was Hoffman. He looked like a deliciously complex villain in the trailers, and a volatile one at that. But what you see in the trailers is not what you get in the film. Hoffman spends 95% of his screen time without facial expression or vocal intonation. It's supposed to convey that he is (likely) sociopathic... so is every other Hollywood villain. He has one great scene (the opening scene). His personal vendetta against Hunt seemed half baked, and we never learn anything about him.
Other than Hoffman, the other performances were very good. Rhames rebounds with flair from his walk-in-the-park role in Mi-2. Cruise and his girlfriend seemed authentic on the screen, and Cruise even gets quite intense (again the topper is the opening scene). The characters share a lot of humorous banter (Luther criticizes Ethan's love life while on mission, while occasionally switching back to discussing the mission)...
In my opinion, the film could have been absolutely superb, but it either tried too hard (the romance) or not enough (Hoffman).