Mission: Impossible III

JJ Abrams’ directorial debut, Mission: Impossible III follows Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt as he and his team set out to stop a psychotic arms dealer (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian) from selling an exceedingly dangerous weapon. Filmmaker J.J. Abrams, working from a script written with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, certainly does a superb job of immediately capturing the viewer’s interest and attention, as Mission: Impossible III kicks off with an in-media-res opening that effectively establishes the stakes and the decidedly vicious bent of Hoffman’s maniacal villain – with the movie, from there, segueing into a blisteringly-paced midsection that does, for the first time, attempt to flesh out and add some depth to Cruise’s cipher-like character. It’s equally clear, however, that Abrams has infused the picture with a somewhat (and relatively) generic feel, as Mission: Impossible III does, for the most part, resemble precisely the sort of small-screen endeavors on which Abrams cut his teeth (ie the movie certainly possesses more than a passing resemblance to Abrams’ Alias television series). This is a fairly minor complaint for a film that is, for the most part, exciting and entertaining, with the perpetually watchable atmosphere heightened on a rather ongoing basis by Cruise’s typically engaging and charismatic turn as the iconic protagonist (and this is to say nothing of Hoffman’s gleefully larger-than-life, scene-stealing performance).

*** out of ****

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