Mission Impossible III

Is it just too much Tom Cruise? Starring: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Philip S. Hoffman (Los Angeles, California) Tom Cruise is so much more than just tabloid fodder and the father of Katie Holmes' baby. Sometimes he's also a movie star - "the most exciting and successful star in the world," if you choose to accept the hype for Mission: Impossible III, which isn't so much the latest sequel in an astronomical summer franchise as it is a replay of some of Cruise's best-known hits. Taking over as director after Brian De Palma and John Woo, J.J. Abrams does put his own enormously successful stylistic stamp on the series. 

M:I3 often feels like an extended, sweeps-period episode of Abrams' Alias; the action moves so swiftly and skilfully, you don't realize you're watching a two-hour-plus film. Abrams, who also created the TV series Felicity and Lost, tries to instill within these characters an interior life we hadn't seen in the previous two films. Cruise's Secret Agent Ethan Hunt keeps his identity hidden from his fiancée by pretending he's a traffic analyst _ yeah, right _ when he's actually off on adventures with his partners, played by Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q. And as you'd expect, some of the toys and twists are coolly clever and amusing. But time and time again, Cruise goes back to being Cruise, which distracts you from the fact that he's supposed to be a spy trying to track down and take out international weapons dealer Owen Davian, played by Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman. A scene at an airport finds Cruise disguised as an overgrown hippie in a knit cap, denim jacket and bad facial hair, as if he'd just left the set of Born on the Fourth of July. 

Later we see him prowling the dark hallways of a shabby Shanghai apartment building, like something out of Minority Report. He's constantly running, which also is reminiscent of Minority Report and its mantra, "Everybody runs," or any number of Cruise vehicles, including The Firm, Jerry Maguire and War of the Worlds. Hoffman's presence, meanwhile, calls to mind the first time he and Cruise paired up in Magnolia, one of the most charismatic performances of Cruise's career. And then of course there is the obvious homage to the original Mission: Impossible: Suspended by cables, Ethan sprawls out in the air and drops down, his belly just barely hovering above the ground. Cruise is the same guy with the same look on his face all the time: part panic, part adrenaline rush, his eyes lightly squinting and his mouth slightly agape. He could be scared, he could be in love. 

Same thing. Oh, and the woman he loves on screen, played by Michelle Monaghan, looks eerily like Holmes, the woman he loves off screen. Maybe all these allusions are intentional in the script from Abrams and his Alias co-writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci; if so, they're too cutesy. Or maybe it's just inevitable that when you've starred in about a film a year for the past 25 years, you're bound to revisit some of the same territory. Either way, this phenomenon of self-reference only serves as a reminder of how little range Cruise has. Not that you're looking for range when you walk into a movie like this. You don't care whether the plot is sufficiently developed or the villain is believably menacing. And by the way he's not - you never know enough about Davian to have any reason to truly fear him, which is a complete waste of Hoffman, the best actor the film's got. No, you want explosions. You want car chases and shootouts. You want dazzling, gravity-defying stunts. Well, you've got those. 

A firefight on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge involving Ethan and his partners goes on too long, but it does feature somersaulting, exploding sport utility vehicles, a rocket-firing drone and a helicopter packed with elite bad guys squeezing off rounds from automatic rifles. If you're into that sort of thing. But some of the action sequences in M:I3 can be jaw-droppingly thrilling, notably the one in which Ethan swings through the night from the top of one Shanghai skyscraper to another before sliding face-first down an angled glass roof. Ultimately, though, when he comes to a breathless, abrupt halt, you realize: it's Tom Cruise. They're not going to kill Tom Cruise. If all the negative publicity in the world can't do it, nothing will.

*By Christy Lemire, Associated Press