'Splosions

Rating: 5/10 (23 May 2006)

I saw MI:I because I had fond half-memories of the before-my-time series, not that it mattered because the movie shares NOTHING with the show save for the name, but MI:I was a tolerable action flick. I saw MI:II because John Woo (Hard Boiled, anyone?) directed it. It was another tolerable action flick with better, Woo-ed up moves. I saw MI:III, despite the star going insane, because JJ Abrams (ALIAS back when it was good, LOST) directed it. And?
MI:III is ALIAS-back-when-it-was-good The Movie. Alias started out as a great show, an intelligent serial thriller whose influence is felt on all dramas to this day, and then...then the intelligence just vanished the INSTANT JJ Abrams left to create LOST. Like the show, MI:III has Greg Grunberg in a cameo, focuses more on the spy's fake cover story, gives the spy a fiancé' to start out with so there's something at stake, uses the phrase "wheels up," satellite picture technology of the same caliber as in Alias, the foreign languages to compliment the disguises, and even has Keri Russell from Abram's first (and only bad) work "Felicity." Heck, it even starts in Media Res like half the Alias episodes. I mean, it's like Abrams wrote out an Alias movie but couldn't get it financed, so he just switched the character names when he got offered directorship of this franchise.
This is a good thing, because like I said, Alias-back-then was awesome. MI:III is less awesome because it's all been done before, but still a functional plot skeleton for the action scenes. The fact that the whole perfect-masks from MI:II has been reused is a bad thing, because it's a bad gimmick, but at least here the gimmick is better justified because the team has to pull a whole mission to get the mask data before they can use it.
Speaking of which, the fact that there are team missions instead of solo ops makes it closer to the Mission Impossible show than the first two movies, although it's far closer still to the Alias show.
And that's what it's all about, isn't it? There's only Sex and Violence in this world, sexy violence and violent, violent sex, so why not enjoy them? Helicopters explode like it's their purpose in life, punches get traded for kicks, a few jet-launched missiles juggle cars. It moves fast, little wasted time. That said, JJ Abrams can do better in terms of story and characters, I've seen it. MI:III is entertaining enough if you don't demand a Fight Club-level plot from your movies.
And as a kung fu-film fan, I don't.