Mission: Impossible 3

Rating: 3/10 (9 June 2006)

*SPOILERS AHEAD* I don't understand why the world needs to have Mission Impossible 3. For that matter, I didn't understand why we needed Mission Impossible 2. I suppose that since the finale of the first film ended on a leftover gag from the 60's TV series that they felt it was okay to dish out another sub-par spy thriller. But Mission Impossible 2 was nothing like the first film. John Woo replaced Brian DePalma and instead of an intriguing premise with some sweat-inducing sequences we get a stoic Tom Cruise acting cool and casual and risking everything to save a girl he hardly knows. He jumps off moving bikes, he hangs from mountains, he takes on a dozen bad guys at once (all the while doves fly about for no apparent reason). Ehtan Hunt is super human.
So why does Mission Impossible 3 start off with Ethan Hunt battered and bruised struggling and hoping that his wife will not be executed right before his very eyes. Why is he know a married man with a normal life and normal friends. What made him stop doing impossible missions? I suppose it's because he met a woman and fell in love blah blah blah - but what happened to the woman from the first? By this point I'm sure some of you are thinking that I'm digging too deep into this. Hear me out; Ethan Hunt is a caricature - not a character. With each of these films he is somebody different - so why should we care about his new adventure if the character isn't consistent? The premise of the film is that Ethan Hunt has been out of the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) for some time and has fallen in love and is settling down. He his called back into duty by his a former teammate (Billy Crudup) to rescue an old protégé of his, Lindsay,(Keri Russell) who has been kidnapped by an very nasty arms dealer (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Lindsay dies immediately after the rescue and Ethan Hunt takes on another mission; to track down the arms dealer and recover a top secret device called 'The Rabbit's Foot' It's futile to make Ethan Hunt a living breathing human being. The movie tries, but we just never get passed that fact that there really is no story or character to care about. It's easy to pull the wool over the audiences eyes and claim that this good guy is now the bad guy or vice versa when we hardly ever see that character. Mission Impossible 3 is a series of plot devices centered around ideas for action sequences.T he film is another attempt to deliver some over-the-top thrills - all of them hopelessly contrived and silly.
When Tom Cruise is running after Philip Seymour Hoffman on the bridge he jumps what looks like a 15 foot gap in a bridge (barely makes it) - even though minutes ago he ran around it...
When swinging from one building to another Tom Cruise has his teammates distract the guards so he can land and slide down the building whilst he shoots the guards...couldn't't his teammates have snipered these men off? When trying to break into the Vatican, Tom Cruise causes a traffic jam to distract the cameras so he can leap up a wall, climb down the other side and dress in costume to meet up with Ving Rhames - who swam underneath and then blows up a wall and enters the Vatican too.
I scoffed at the film every 5 minutes because of the lack of reasoning.
As for the Rabbit's Foot; this is what the movie is about. This is the reason Ethan Hunt's life is in danger; this is the reason his wife is kidnapped; this is the reason he has to fly across the world to retrieve it. Yet, it's never explained to us what exactly 'The Rabbit's Foot' is. It is a cheap, gimmick just to keep us on board. At the end of the film just ask yourself one question. Why? Because if you put the pieces together it's a jumbled mess.