Mission Impossible III

I avoided the third installment of Mission Impossible for the same reason a lot of people did: Tom Cruise. It's a tradeoff: a bankable star becomes a liability if you happen to dislike him. Of course, the people who don't like these big budget stars are usually not substantial enough to affect sales. Given Sumner Redstone's, CEO of Paramount, decision to cut ties with Cruise, it seems that his outrageous antics finally caught up with him.

And that's a shame, because Mission Impossible III is really good.

The problems I've had with the other installments revolved around what happened to the original conceit of the series: it was a carefully planned operation performed by a team. Being privy to the operation in the beginning, we worried for each agent as they performed their particularly dangerous and important task. This is the whole symbolism of the burning fuse: the agents light the fuse, but the conclusion is an inevitable explosion. In short, we knew what to expect and got it at every episode, even if there were a few twists and turns along the way.

Thus making Mission Impossible a star vehicle is against the spirit of the series. There's no one star agent; there can't be, because every agent is important. Right? The first two movies forgot that point.

In MI3, J.J. Abrams brings the series back to its roots. In essence, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) performs a standard mission extraction. They pull it off perfectly. There's just one problem: the bad guy (Owen Davian, played with chilling aplomb by Philip Seymour Hoffman) refuses to be interrogated. Utterly unafraid, he begins interrogating his interrogator. And suddenly, MI3 has been turned on its ear.

What if everything went right, asks Abrams, and it still all went horribly wrong?

What's so refreshing about MI3 is that even when Hunt defects, even when he's not sure who's on his side, his team sticks by him. When he goes rogue, his team goes with him. And when he goes on a mission to stop Davian, his teammates are right there in the mix, risking their lives for their leader.

There are some amazing scenes, including a sliding fight on the rooftop of an office skyscraper and a helicopter battle in a wind turbine farm. Add into the mix a ticking time bomb and the tension and action keeps the audience on its toes.

By never forgetting what made Mission Impossible great, Abrams brings the magic back. And Cruise delivers without hopping on a single couch.