Mission : Impossible : III - A Movie Review

ok...another MI movie....in 12 years...yes MI movies are made once in 6 years...:-)...just that much for the movie's credit...

You could be crazy to expect great storyline kinda stuff in such sequels...and as Murphy's SSS law states..."Sequels Seldom Succeed"....this one would cling on to word "Seldom" ...and will succeed, though not great in MI terms..:-)...

The movie...opens up with a clever screenplay of showing the climax and pepping up the audience...good... Philip Seymour Hoffman...is non-chalant in his ruthlessness...which is a great, great addition to the thrill factor in all the interrogation scenes between tom and the big baddie....actually, philip looks more "Ashish Vidyarthi-ish" ...than like a hollywood character....!!!

The familiar MI tune, is orchestrated very well...but I felt some variance to the tune, would have pepped up the background score...I wonder, what majic AR Rahman could have done to the solid base of the MI tune....I was disappointed at places with the background score...:-(..definetely ARR fares better...!!!

The story: Ethan Hunt is about to get married, and inbetween, he has to go to berlin to rescue a Intelligence agent of their group...takes off in a troupe of 4 people...a helluva techie gizmos and fundas intact...they trace the whereabouts and enter into the building without a problem!!!! and almost rescue the agent, alas...they find that she is injected with a detonator...and amidst a Helicopter chasing sequence, she dies...:-)...looks familiar for any bollywood, kollywood fan!!!... then he comes back home, marries his love, offbeat, and he finds a parcel for him from the dead agent, which reveals blatant secrets that his higher office is behind saving the baddie... and he travels to Rome to kidnap the baddie...does that to perfection...and enroute... the echelons of power take away the baddie typical to bollywood fashion and then Ethan Hunt is led to China...where his wife is kept as hostage...the baddie gives him a time race of getting the coveted target lest his wife gets killed...akin to our Vijayakanth's movies.....and it is a sentimental-cum-duty thing that he must accomplish...and guess what he accomplishes after some hungama in the climax...much like our kollywood heros....and SUBHAM at the end...:-)


So every indian knows and has seen hundreds of cop movies of this sort..and infact..if this was given to some Perarasu / KS Ravikumar, the movie would be much, much better....the only cushion this director had was, he was directing a big-time hollywood movie...and millions of bucks to back him up!!!! Pathetic is the word I can find for a ploy in the screenplay at the following instant "Just to say Tom Cruise can do efficient lip-reading during an important point of the movie...Inserted was a scene to tell people that he could lip-read, intruding in a Womens-only small talk by lip-reading over the glass window" This is schoolboyish screenplay, not expected/acceptable in hollywood movies of this big a stature...There are hundreds of subtler ways to tug in this info into the movie plot. There are too many drag scenes between Tom and his girl friend/wife..which is unwarranted for MI movies but needed for the senti-part of the movie...this is where you can figure out why Hollywood movies always outshine Indian movies...whenever indian movies harp on sentiment, a drag is imminent in the plot, which MI-3 couldn't avert, because it was much like an Indian Masala...:-)


....All said and done, the captain of this MI3 hasn't been unbearable...there were moments of brilliance and swift action...which definetely needs appreciation....particularily the vatican episode...was fantastic...the least to say...the screenplay was beautiful and crisp...every scene asthetically shot...I loved every moment of it...the berlin scenes were good...very good excitement...adrenalin starts rising in those scenes...but the same can't be associated with the Shangai scenes except for the tower-to-tower swinging!!!!...wow...what excitement it was...:-). The climax for such a built-up movie...should have been more exciting...thats the rule for such movies...and then both the baddies were knocked off in the most uncharacteristic fashion...TOM CRUISE not involved in both!!! Not acceptable!!!

On to the cast....
Philip Seymour Hoffman as the baddie has done justice to whatever has been offered to him...just a few scenes....the same as Lawrence Fishburne...both of these star actors have been grossly under utilized and their characters could have been better developed....no fault of theirs!!!The heroine of the movie was "yuck"...no real character depth, nor screen presence for the actor...I was unimpressed by the selection for the top-babe....but Maggie Q and the other agent in Berlin were much better...and their roles and emotion were far better...:-) Ving Rhames was seriously funny at times...out of this, there isn't much of any real character worth mentioning...!!


Overall Verdict would : Good..but could have been much, much better if the plot was lil less sentimental...there's the lesson Cruise/Wagner production should learn from...:-(