Mission Possible

We had no intention whatsoever of going to see MI:III, but Microsoft took us for free on Friday morning to Crossroads in Bellevue, so we figured what the hell. Maybe it'd give us a chance to write a bad review, which is always fun. The theater was packed with Microsofties--a fairly tough crowd, it turns out. After the preview for The Break-Up, we're gonna go out on a limb and say many denizens of the Evil Empire are on Team Jolie. On the plus side, it was possibly the shortest wait for the ladies room we've endured in a crowd that size since our last trip to a Seahawks game.

At any rate. We're a little sad to report that we will not in fact be giving MI:III a bad review. Don't panic, it's not a great review or anything, and there will be no love for Tom given herewith. His benefit of the doubt done run out for us. But the movie was pretty darn fun. J.J. Abrams, of Alias and Lost fame, directed it, and it does play like a meaty television episode (with a big big budget), which is what the first two should probably have striven for as well.

The plot is so irrelevant even the characters admit as much, but here it is in a nutshell: Tom (oh, we're so sorry, that is, Ethan) has given up field work to become a trainer of Impossible Agents so he can marry his hot nurse girlfriend (Michelle Monaghan) and live in a Pottery Barn catalogue. When all of a sudden, uh oh, a former colleague shows up and tempts him with a mission that doesn't appear to be particularly impossible (cheaters) to save a former student from the clutches of Owen Davian, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who you already know we adore). The mission isn't quiiiite successful (must've been impossible after all) and a hard-assed bureaucrat played delightfully nonsensically by Laurence Fishburn, gets all up in Tom's grill about procedure and protocol and other such dirty words, so of course Tom just has to go rogue and get the bad guy himself. Of course now that he and his girlfriend are sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g, he's all sorts of vulnerable, and Davian exploits that weakness with efficient sadism by forcing him to go get some Maguffin or other (it's called the Rabbit's Foot for no particular reason) or he'll torture and kill poor Miss Perfect.

Make sense? Doesn't matter. The point is that it's familiar enough to hang all sorts of very fun and very ridiculous run-around-and-blow-'em-up scenarios on. And, after a fairly disappointing first operation, Abrams does a very fine job of keeping the action moving without setting up too many false climaxes (a pet peeve of ours with summer action films--we know there're gonna be 6 or 8 big action sequences, so not all of them need to feel like The Last Battle). And he corrects some of the mistakes of the first two, such as overreliance on Unmaskings and a plot that tries to make sense. The rest of the cast besides Tom is great, and you know who was the especially terrific? Keri Russell. We know! Felicity! Dude, someone needs to give that girl an action franchise STAT, because she was kick ASS. Also noteworthily excellent were Ving Rhames as the designated sense-maker (Ving, like Tom, has a clear schtick, but he doesn't try and overdo every damn thing), and Billy Crudup as Ethan's agent contact. That guy's been getting the "hey, he can really act" buzz for so long now that we think his chances of a true breakthrough role are getting pretty slim, but the whole time he was on screen we kept thinking "hey, he can really act," so... for whatever that's worth. And finally, prettyboy Jonathan Rhys Meyers also performed creditably well as the whippersnapper on Ethan's team.

And then there was Tom. The short version: shut up, Tom. The longer version: ok, you make really really entertaining summer movies, and you deserve to get paid a lot for that even though you're a seriously seriously creepy guy and we find it hard to forget that while we're watching you on screen. But we're movie reveiwers not life reviewers (today anyway), and your "intensity" onscreen in these films is just distracting now. We GET that your character is a great guy and athletic and moral and competent and all that stuff. You don't have to Sell Every Second. We respect the cock, ok? Jeez. Tone it down.

So. Fun summer action movie. No, really! We know, we wanted to hate it too!