This review contains minor spoilers.
Television uber-producer ("Lost", "Alias", "Felicity) makes his motion picture directorial debut with what must have seemed, on paper at least, to be a can´t miss proposition: the third installment in a summer action/adventure franchise starring one of the world´s biggest (if not biggest) male stars that officially kicks off the summer movie season. While "Mission Impossible III" fires on all the cylinders required of a summer tent pole movie, it fails to deliver in one critical department: character.
Sure, Tom Cruise gets plenty of screen time and Ving Rhames reprises his role as Ethan Hunt´s (Cruise) right hand man Luther Stickell. However, the other two new field team members (Maggie Q and Johnathan Rhys Meyers) get no development whatsoever in the entire 126 minutes running time. They are mere pawns for Ethan to use and move around while trying to find something called the Rabbit´s Foot in order to save his wife Julia.
The majority of the movie is told in flashback following an opening in which the chief villain (Philip Seymour Hoffman´s Owen Davian) is shown to have captured both Ethan and Julia. Julia, apparently, gets shot and the events leading up to this moment are told…of course, complete with the trademark "Mission Impossible" burning fuse and music.
It´s the great travesty of this movie that it was able to cast a wide range of talent in the lead acting roles and it fails to utilize them to their maximum potential. The most notable failure is Hoffman, Oscar winner for "Capote". By all rights, as the antagonist and arguably the second biggest name in the picture, he should have as much screen time as Cruise. That´s not the case and what he is given is really limited to an evolved form of mustache twirling. He captures the girl, taunts the hero with the girl´s death and has ambiguous-at best-evil plans.
That plan, unfortunately, borrows heavily not only from current events but also from the first film. It´s not that the idea is bad in and of itself, it´s that the plan is not exposed to the audience organically. There´s a scene of incomparable exposition in which the bad guy lays out the entire plan. Now, someone please tell me why, after all these years, the villains continue to do this? It makes no sense and never has. The other letdown on the evil side of the equation is that Davian is merely a transporter of the Rabbit´s Foot. It´s not his mastermind plan; he´s basically a pawn in someone else´s scheme.
And let´s talk about this Rabbit´s Foot for a moment. We (and the characters, for that matter) are never truly told what is inside the Biohazard tube they steal from the Chinese. An IMF computer expert shares what he believes is contained inside the canister. Essentially, it´s a chemical weapon. Even in the end when everyone is saved and disaster is averted (come on, that´s no spoiler…do you really think the good guys are going to lose this one?), Hunt asks what the Rabbit´s Foot is. The response? If he can promise to come back from his honeymoon, he can know. Hunt can´t promise that, so the information doesn´t change hands.
The action pieces, by and large, are as well done as they possibly could be while being realistic. It´s a testament to everyone behind the scenes that they move as fluidly as they do, considering the dialogue, music and sound effects overlapping each other. In lesser hands, these sequences could have been a jumbled mess. If the characters don´t explain to each other what they´re doing first (as in the Shanghai theft), then it is very evident to every viewer.
The best action sequence in the movie happens to be the events in the Vatican. What is most impressive about this stretch is not how many explosions or gunfights the characters engage in; rather, it boils down to the creativeness of the field team. Saying more than that would spoil the surprises.
Let´s talk about the ending for a moment. It has an incredible sense of finality to it as Ethan and Julia run away to their honeymoon. It´s shot in slow motion and it feels as though this series has come full circle. Ethan has a wife to take care of and, going back to the beginning of the movie, has to be cajoled and ultimately guilt tripped into accepting another field assignment. There´s no specific dialogue to insinuate the ending of the franchise, per se. Sometimes, as in this case, what is on screen is more important than what is heard.
"Mission Impossible III" is exactly what it is billed to be: a kick off to the summer movie season. Unfortunately, there seems to be an unspoken understanding that blockbuster flicks need to dumb it down for the audience. They don´t need to. What could have been an excellent movie is slightly above average because it loses its characters in all the action. I would gladly give up one action set piece (trust me on this, there are too many of them) for three minutes of development for any character outside of Ethan Hunt. But it is the explosions which get butts in the seats, now isn´t it?