Mission: Impossible III -- 2006 -- PG-13

I wasn't sure wat to expect here. It was a big budget summer blockbuster with Tom Cruise and a sequel. Tom was bad mouthing the movie in previews with led to Paramount ousting him and him becoming a partner in United Artists. Some like it; some hate it. What do I think after seeing it?

I'm in the liking camp. I was concerned in the teaser when Tom was refusing to act, but that got cleared up and we got into the stream of te film where Ethan Hunt is celebrating his engagement and he no longer works in the field, but as an instructor for IMF. His fiancee knows nothing of this line of work and thinks he is a traffic pattern analyzer. It's amusing and works rather well for a start, not to mention giving our boy the least bit a of character and later, a motivation.

As luck would have it, IMF wants him to go after an agent who got caught, and that's where the fun begins. They're after an arms dealer, and after that first mission goes down, they immediately setup using what info they gathered to collect this dealer at his only known appearance any time soon. So of course, that mission succeeds and of course, he escapes. We begin descending into cliche land here.

Since our main character has a significant other, she gets kidnapped and used as a bargaining chip. he of course completes said mission for the bad guys using the most complex and outlandish means possible (hey, it's a big budget flick). Girl impossibly tracked down in the end and bad guy bites it.

My main complaint abut the ending is how the accomplice is dealt with. It came off very cheap to have all these big bangs and such, and accomplice wanders randomly down a hallway and gets popped off...and not by Ethan either. Kind of random there.

The plot was engaging and exciting, of course. It wasn't totally free of bumps, but it worked well. The characters were on the whole very two dimensional. I don't know the names of the friends of Ethan at all, much less any of their character. They chatted at some point, but by that time, we'd forgotten everything except that they helped out. The bad guy was ok, but still pretty thin as well.

So the film worked as a popcorn flick, but beyond that, it was nothing that will be remembered in the annals of film as a great movie. Just something that filled a summer once.