Mission Impossible 3 Review

By Daniel Dessinger

March 12, 2006

I am one of those people who feels disgust at the thought of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Nicole Kidman is one the closest we have to a Hollywood starlett, and Tom passed her up for a child. If the object of his affection hadn’t been a girl almost young enough to be his daughter, Cruise’s behavior might have come off as romantic. As it stands, he is a once king turned peasant.

I really try to avoid caring or even learning about the personal lives of actors and actresses. I really don’t care how weird or stupid or dramatic they can be. I just want to see a good performance. But when a guy does something that becomes so widely publicized that even I manage to see the replay, noticing becomes unavoidable.

Keeping this in mind, Mission Impossible 3 was a very entertaining movie. It didn’t even occur to me en route to the show that I was about to watch Tom Cruise the public embarrassment. I was going to watch Tom Cruise the actor.

While this is true, I somehow managed to leave the theater with a slightly more positive vibe towards Cruise than I had pre-show. But now that the vivid details of the film have worn off, all I can see now is the same guy acting like an imbecile on Oprah’s fancy couch.

Still, I cannot tell you how impressed I was by the third and best film in the Mission Impossible series. The film doesn’t deserve to win any Academy Awards or anything, although Philip Seymour Hoffman played an incredible villain (Kidd Kraddick agrees with me, anyway).

We see a greater human element with the introduction of a real relationship and marriage. We see Ethan Hunt as a man living separate lives, racked with guilt and stress over hiding the truth from his wife.

The action sequences are still impossible. The explosions and jumps and escapes and attacks are all beyond the realm of unlikely. Yet this time he moves with a purpose we can actually identify with: to protect the one he loves. His wife’s life hangs in the balance. The risks seem that much more dangerous because, for Ethan Hunt, the stakes are high. Truth is, Hollywood gossip means almost nothing.

Though it has become the preferred gossip among teenagers and adults nation wide, an actor has to do something pretty horrendous to lost popularity at the box office. Mission Impossible III belongs to a series so famous that even Tom’s couch session can be set aside for a couple hours of intense, armrest gripping entertainment.