Let’s say you’re a beautiful woman who has just been kidnapped by a ruthless international arms dealer bent on torturing you until he uncovers the location of a doomsday weapon.
Maybe a husband who will jump on the couch for you is exactly what the world needs.
Ethan Hunt, a.k.a. Tom Cruise, will jump the couch. Or drive the couch through the streets of Vatican City at 100 miles per. Or fly the couch through a wind farm. Or BASE jump the couch off a Hong Kong skyscraper.
Whatever it takes, baby doll, Hunt/Cruise will make it happen. He’ll even cry or crack jokes for you to “humanize” a “Mission: Impossible” franchise previously known for being as cold and self-absorbed as it was lucrative.
And bless Oprah’s dented couch cushions, it works. “Mission: Impossible III” is a great ride to kick off the summer movie season, crammed with killer action sequences and softened ever-so-slightly by camaraderie, a sense of humor and hints of domestic bliss.
“M:I:III” feels like a whole movie, as opposed to the first two installments, which played like competent action movies missing that certain something extra. Credit crossover director J.J. Abrams for bringing the comforting sensibility of television to Tom Cruise’s eternally pumped world.
Abrams knows that for us to keep caring whether Ethan Tom Hunt wins, the world’s top secret agent must for a time look as if he could actually lose. Previous “Mission” directors Brian De Palma and John Woo simply spritzed Cruise with imitation sweat and called it good.
It helps enormously to work on the casting. Too often in Tom Cruise vehicles, the movie is his world and everyone is an extra just living in it.
Here, we get the stunning brunette Michelle Monaghan as Ethan’s fiancée – and yes, a moment in her arms would be enough to make an agent forget all about global arms trafficking. Monaghan has a face that connects with audiences in a way Cruise can’t. She graced the overlooked indie movie “Winter Solstice,” plus “North Country” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.”
Abrams also turns third-timer Ving Rhames loose to give Ethan Hunt a little workplace joshing, and rounds out his go-team with Jonathan Rhys Meyers (“Match Point”) and the intriguing Maggie Q, a model and Hong Kong action goddess.
Laurence Fishburne adds his usual elegant menace as a spy agency director who may be friend or faux. (“Please don’t interrupt me when I’m asking rhetorical questions,” he purrs.)
Then there’s this fellow named Philip Seymour Hoffman, miles away from Kansas and “Capote,” as a humorless gangster angling to kick the stuffing out of Ethan Hunt. Hoffman trades pashmina for some smashmouth, and creates a worthy foil for an Ethan Hunt distracted by nuptial pressures.
You want plot? Here’s something new: Ethan must save the Earth and fight internal conspiracy at the same time.
Doing so involves blowing up a Berlin warehouse, a helicopter chase through the swirling blades of a wind farm, entering the Vatican through a sewage pipe, and surviving an explosive commute on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Forget recent charges of illegal domestic surveillance, “M:I:III” goes straight to illegal domestic missile assaults by CIA drone planes.
Abrams tosses in a well-aimed political jab as well. A rogue agency director wants to falsely implicate and attack a Muslim country for stealing the doomsday machine. “When the sand settles, our country will do what it does best – clean up. Create infrastructure.” Sounds like a worthy effort for “Mission: Impossible: IV,” now playing at the world cineplex near us all.
The action demands of the “Mission” franchise leave plots with too many holes and too many implausible sequences to reach the level of the recent “Bourne” efforts, to name one ideal. But all the popcorn season really wants is a good reason to see super-fit bodies flying around on a big screen, and “M:I:III” gits ‘er done.
Staff writer Michael Booth
can be reached at 303-820-1686
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