Mission Impossible III [Blu-ray]

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Product Description
Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 05/20/2008 Rating: Pg13

Amazon.com
At the time of its release, Mission: Impossible III's box office was plagued by the publicity backlash against couch-jumping star Tom Cruise. It's too bad, because this third installment of the spy thriller franchise deserved a better reception than it got. First-time feature director J.J. Abrams (bigwig TV director/producer of Lost, Alias, & Felicity) proves more than able-bodied in creating a Mission: Impossible that's leaner and less over-stylized than John Woo's sequel and less confusing than Brian De Palma's original. Plot is still a throwaway here (Cruise's Ethan Hunt rescues his kidnapped former trainee and works to steal a device that... well, we don't really know what it does, but it's something about mass destruction that costs $850 million), but the action sequences, particularly one where Ethan faces down a helicopter on a bridge and gets flung hard against the side of a car, are particularly impressive since Cruise, at 44, is still doing most of his own stunts and shows no hint of the weathered look that's struck his action-star peers. (Though no Mission: Impossible stunt will ever be quite as simultaneously nail-biting and funny as the first film's wire-dangling break-in of CIA headquarters.)

Mission: Impossible III boasts a pedigreed cast, particularly Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) as baddie arms dealer Owen Davian. Hoffman plays Owen all teeth-clenched and cool, especially when threatening to kill Ethan in front of his lovely new wife (Michelle Monaghan) who has no idea of his spy life. But in his first action-film lead role, Hoffman's almost too calm and collected to really make a memorable villain, especially when the rest of the cast--Ving Rhames (the only other cast member to return for all three films), Asian film star Maggie Q, and an underused Jonathan Rhys-Meyers--are a highlight as Ethan's IMF team. Mission: Impossible is still fun popcorn spy fare, and if Cruise chooses to end the franchise here, at least he goes out on a high note. --Ellen A. Kim

Customer Reviews: Read 249 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Great Summer Action From J.J. Abrams & Great Performance By Hoffman, But Where's The Originality? May 8, 2006
42 out of 58 found this review helpful

MOVIE: While Summer isn't officially here, it is here in terms of movies. Mission Impossible 3 kicks off the summer movie season with a bang with an interesting and entertaining installment in the money-making franchise. Tom Cruise reprises his Ethan Hunt role and J.J. Abrams takes the director's chair. What makes the Mission Impossible franchise so interesting is the constant change of directors. If you look at other franchises like Lethal Weapon, Pink Panther, Indiana Jones, etc, the directors usually stay on board for the sequels. Even with the James Bond franchise you have directors usually doing several Bond films in a row. Mission Impossible was helmed by Brian De Palma and was all espionage with light action. Action maestro John Woo took the second one and made an explosive and entertaining action sequel even if it was a little over cooked. J.J. Abrams makes his feature film directorial debut with Mission Impossible 3, which is a little bit of espionage and a little bit of action. For those who don't know Abrams, he started out writing films like Armageddon and Regarding Henry. He then broke into the television scene with Alias, a pretty popular show. He became very well known recently for his latest show. Abrams is the creator of LOST, one of my favorite shows. So, I was excited to see his first movie. M:I-3 has Ethan Hunt trying to settle down and start a normal life, but he is thrown back into his old job when an arms dealer played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman wants him to track down the Rabbit's Foot. The Rabbit's Foot is some kind of weapon of mass destruction, and if Hunt doesn't retrieve it in 48 hours his fiance will be killed. What follows are explosive action sequences that sing the right tune to satisfy all of our action appetites. The movie is good, but I couldn't help feeling like something was lacking. I tried to pinpoint it, and the only thing that I could come up with was that it lacked style. Sure it had LOST written all over it. The tight close ups, starting the film by showing the ending and then rewinding back to the beginning, getting Michael Giacchino to compose an almost identical score to LOST, even re-creating a scene from LOST at the end, but still the movie didn't feel like it had an overall style. The reason why I liked M:I-2 was that it had John Woo style. The slow motion build up, the doves, and of course Hans Zimmer's amazing music. I'm just saying that Mission Impossible 3 is good, but it's not a definative action movie that stands out from the rest, let's see how Abrams develops his techniques with future projects now that he's broken into the movie scene.

ACTING: Phillip Seymour Hoffman steals the show as the incredibly self centered and hot tempered Owen Davian. You can tell he had lots of fun with the role. Tom Cruise does what he does perfectly and basically owns the character. The supporting effort by Ving Rhames and the rest of the gang are not anything spectacular. It's really all about Hoffman and Cruise.

BOTTOM LINE: M:I-3 delivers the goods, but it doesn't step above anything we've seen before. The bridge fight and helicopter chase were the only scenes in the movie that really felt original, everything else felt like it has been done many times before. It's entertaining, it's fun, and you'll enjoy it. It was great to see Hoffman and Cruise really work off each other. Abrams does a great job directing, but he really didn't make it his own in my opinion.

3 out of 5 stars

Intolerable mission June 8, 2006
23 out of 32 found this review helpful

The mission, should you decide to accept it, is to read a completely negative review of this movie.

Before, I need to make clear that I enjoy action movies a lot, that I enjoy the explosions, the frantic action scenes, the villains, heroes and any other accessory that contains a film of this kind. Likewise, it's important to emphasize that I enjoyed enormously the "prequels" of Mission Impossible, and for that very same reason, I have to explain why Mission Impossible III did not fulfill my expectations.

Don't get me wrong. YES, it has lots of action, special effects and above all, it has Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain. The problem in this movie falls in the absurd turn that the plot took.

Mission Impossible used to be a series where a group of extraordinarily gifted secret agents were assigned to carry out "impossible" missions, with state-of-the-art technological tricks, disguises, and the possibility that always they were about of be discovered.

Though MI-I and MI-II suppressed at the most the "group of agents" concept and centered all the action in only one, Mr. Ethan Hunt, we could accepted that once again it was Hunt the leader of this new mission.

But when the "supposed" mission revolves around the hero romantic relationship, I would expect that at least such relation had some sense. On the contrary, is a relationship based on lies, and it doesn't have enough dramatic weight for us to value the faith of these two people.

It would appear the Tom Cruise can't allow the prospect of sharing scenes with other co-starts that could offer anything else more than his worn out smiles, facial expressions and tiresome acrobatics.

JJ Abrams (Lost), in his debut on the big screen, directs the movie as if it was a 2-hour Alias episode, cluttered and clumsy, presenting an elaborate plot without substance, always with a fast pace, descending the rhythm only when Hoffman is on the screen.

And it's thanks to the unquestionable qualities of Hoffman as a performer that MI-III is not a total fiasco. Many people will stay astonished with the explosions, the frenetic helicopters pursuits, the disguises, the jumps from skyscrapers and the explosive action scenes. Others will get out of the theater mentally bored and exhausted after expending 2 hours watching what should had been more of than the same old action thing, but worse.

1 out of 5 stars

Worst of the Missions May 5, 2006
13 out of 26 found this review helpful

We expect an action flick to be filled with solid action with abit of the unbelievable and a so so story to carry it.

Ethan Hunte went from Berlin to Rome to China with only once catching a plane....scenes cut and there he was in china.

I felt no emotions what soever for none of the characters and the final scene where someone who has never fired a gun before acted like they were military trained .....geez.

Ethan has to get his hands on the rabbits foot....they dont know what it is but they have to get it before the bad men do. Let me say that at the films end They (and I)still had no idea what it was....this item is to be sold to someone I haven't seen for $800 million.

The much talked about love story never did it for me as the entire thing seemed like someone's bad idea to spring a nasty surprise on the MI fans....and it worked...it seemed like this relationship buisness was a drunken after thought.

This movie had no reasonable plot and the script was just aweful...nothing tied into each other and I left the cinema feeling even more jaded and dissapointed than i actually knew I would have.

This is not recommended if you want to have a satisfying movie outing. To those who called this a good pop corn flick please....I bought a popcorn and was so caughtout in how bad this movie was that i ended up throwing my popcorn away.

Waste of a movie...even bigger waste of perfectly good popcorn.

4 out of 5 stars

Very entertaining and very impossible... May 21, 2006
12 out of 16 found this review helpful

If you're like me, you love to see good guys win, bad guys get what they deserve, and have lots of things blow up. This is Mission Impossible III. Lots of explosions. Lots of plot twists. A doomed romance. Friends that die, betray and are betrayed.... and lots of techno gadgets tht never fail... hence the impossible part.

It's fun to see the comraderie of the principle characters that have absolutely no fear. They speak every language, they are fit, they have extensive knowledge of various weapons, hand-to-hand fighting techniques, and none of them fears heights, water, knives, guns, fire, poison - you name it - they are invincible.

A highly enjoyable movie-going experience to be sure, but this is one I could live without seeing again. There are some movies that intrigue so much, you don't realize until days later the holes in the plot - but this is one of the movies where you see them as they happen. Albeit James Bond-esque, this movie hinges upon everyone fulfilling their role flawlessly and not one of their high-tech gadgets ever failing. I do believe a lot more plot and script development was present in the first two installments than in this feature.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is (big shock) utterly flawless, and one of the best parts of the film. The whole take-over plot involving the Vatican was very enjoyable, but I believe many integral parts had to end up on the cutting room floor to make the movie an appropriate length. When I see movies like "The Bourne Identity" where they explain everything within the allotted time, it still has amazing explosions, tech and fighting, yet you get emotionally involved w/ the plot and characters and find everything fairly plausible, it's hard to excuse this film from its shortcomings with a straight face.

There is enough good acting, gun play and stunt moves to save it from total duldrums, but this is not big on intellectualism. Sound buffs will appreciate the attention to detail regarding the sound. While the plot is questionable, I wouldn't be surprised to see this film get nominated in the Best Sound category at next year's Oscars - every helicopter blade, handcuff link and shell casing can be heard plunking away ala Doppler effect across the theater - I haven't heard Foley sounds that good in a long time.

3 out of 5 stars

Mission Impossible morphs into Alias December 31, 2006
12 out of 15 found this review helpful

It must have been very gratifying for JJ Abrams to make this movie because he always said he conceived of Alias when he was working on Felicity and he thought: "what if Felicity [played by Keri Russell] was a CIA agent?" He finally got to answer that question in this movie. I thought Abrams did a great job with Alias (and also with Lost) so I was expecting this to be the best installment of the Mission Impossible movie series to date and better than his show, Alias. However, while this was not one of those movies that make you think: "that's two hours of my life that I'll never get back," it played less like an installment of Mission Impossible and more like a long of episode of Alias. It would have made a really good episode of Alias, but it didn't feel like Mission Impossible or the Mission Impossible characters.

It started out the way Alias usually started out, the first scene of the movie being the near climax of the story but something that actually happens later in the sequence of events, getting you invested in finding out how everything happened to get them there. From there you go to a party scene where Greg Grunberg (who played Eric Weiss on Alias) has a cameo appearance, and everything gets really weird from there. The gadgets (such as the gun that shoots an electrical device into the brain through the nostrils) and situations (like the wall climbing scene and the jump from the warehouse) were so much like Alias (and at one point like Lost) that by the end of the movie I was expecting Ethan Hunt to rip off a face mask and reveal that he was really Sidney Bristow and his wife Julia to rip off a face mask to reveal that she was really Dr. Jack Shephard underneath. (By the way, are they about done with those face masks already?) Luther Stickell seemed less the Luther Stickell of the past and more a combo of Eric Weiss and Marcus Dixon; in fact an early scene while they were beginning an operation had Luther and Ethan talking about Ethan and Julia and the conversation went a lot like the conversations Eric Weiss and Michael Vaughn used to have about Vaughn and Sidney's relationship during their operations. Lawrence Fishburn's character seemed like a combination of Jack Bristow and Arvin Sloane, Owen Davian's character somewhat like Julian Sark, even Marshall Flinkman was represented in Benji and the "Rabbit's Foot" may as well have been some Rambaldi artifact; thank God they never defined it.

Like I said earlier this movie wasn't a waste of time, I may even buy it when it gets to the $5.50 bin in Wal-Mart. It was just too much like Alias to be satisfying as a Mission Impossible movie. Still, it's impossible to despise JJ Abrams given his sweet romantic streak, and now that I've seen this movie what I'd really like is for him to make an actual "Alias" movie starring all the old characters from that show. But JJ if you do make that movie please don't guest star Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt because watching this movie morph Mission Impossible with Alias is as confused as I care to get without alcohol being involved.

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