Mission: Impossible III
May. 5th, 2006 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedFun! In a smoke-and-mirrors kind of way. I don't think I've ever seen a movie this fun and this...cheap, I guess, at the same time.
Mission: Impossible III moves really quickly. It's a heist movie, but instead of planning for months to set up one big showpiece, and then explaning to the audience exactly how it was done, it just goes. Tom Cruise is in a four-man team with Ving Rhames from the first two Mission: Impossibles and two new faces, an Irish man (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the coach from Bend it Like Beckham) and a Chinese woman (although she is not actually Chinese). They come up with impossible plans for infiltrating ridiculously heavily guarded buildings, plans that must be followed to the second because there is no room for error at all, and before you (the audience, by which I mean me) can figure out why it was necessary to put a tracer on that manhole cover, blow up that wall, or cause that traffic accident, we are already onto the next part of the scene.
The movie starts with a scene from just before the climax. This might have ruined the beginning, except that everything moves so quickly, and the ultimate result so much less important than getting there, that it doesn't really matter whether you know what's going to happen. And when the movie catches up and you watch the scene again, only this time you understand it, it's awesome. I love that shock of recognition.
Trickery aside, I also loved the directing in general. Same director as Lost.
Only the last half hour is set in Shanghai, not most of the movie as I'd heard. If you've seen the trailers, you already know that Tom Cruise jumps off the Jinmao Tower. But the seriously freaky part is not that scene, but the one just before it where he is standing on the edge of a 200 meter drop, and the camera pans around to show the night-lit city far, far below. Aaaaaaaaaaaah ohmygodohmygod aaaaaaahhh. I saw this movie on an Imax screen. If it had been an Omnimax screen, I might not have survived.
Really beautiful urban scenery, in this and in another scene set at the Vatican.
Speaking of scenery: so, so many pretty people. *_* And Philip Seymour Hoffman was the best villain ever. So deadpan! Even tied up, he was frightening.
There is nothing to dislike about the love interest/plot device. At all. She's perfect, and even that isn't annoying. The second scene, at the engagement party, might have been my favorite, because it was so evocative. In five minutes I felt like I had watched an entire "my family interferes with my life because they care!" romantic comedy. It was insta!sympathy.
Low point was the secondary evil villain monologue. The guy used real current US foreign and domestic politics -- or at least a superficial version thereof -- to disjointedly explain his motivives in a way that didn't really make sense. I thought that was Tacky.
Overall a very fun movie whose plot I will probably not remember a month from now. But this is an unsustainable series, isn't it? Eventually Tom Cruise will run out of superiors to double-cross him and/or impossibly guarded buildings to break into. Not to mention the part where he can already take out whole elevators of specially-trained black ops using only a pen. If the producers keep trying to out-do themselves, subsequent movies are going to be very, very silly.
This summer I want to see:
The Inside Man
Thank You For Smoking saw it, great movie
Brick awesome!
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (saw it, just as terrible and awesome I'd thought it would be)
Superman Returns (omg the trailer looks SO GOOD.)
The Break-Up (ahahaha but. Vince Vaughn!)
Snakes on a Plane this was good too!
***
Happy Cinco de Mayo! Happy Hikago Day!
I'm taking the history course. Thanks to everyone who answered the poll! The other course I'm taking is SLAVIC 320: Central European Films. I've never taken a film or art analysis course before, it's really cool (so many things I would never have noticed on my own the professor kindly points out to us) but also really disorienting, because although I blog about movies all the time I don't know how to discuss them academically. Where do you even start.
Mission: Impossible III moves really quickly. It's a heist movie, but instead of planning for months to set up one big showpiece, and then explaning to the audience exactly how it was done, it just goes. Tom Cruise is in a four-man team with Ving Rhames from the first two Mission: Impossibles and two new faces, an Irish man (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the coach from Bend it Like Beckham) and a Chinese woman (although she is not actually Chinese). They come up with impossible plans for infiltrating ridiculously heavily guarded buildings, plans that must be followed to the second because there is no room for error at all, and before you (the audience, by which I mean me) can figure out why it was necessary to put a tracer on that manhole cover, blow up that wall, or cause that traffic accident, we are already onto the next part of the scene.
The movie starts with a scene from just before the climax. This might have ruined the beginning, except that everything moves so quickly, and the ultimate result so much less important than getting there, that it doesn't really matter whether you know what's going to happen. And when the movie catches up and you watch the scene again, only this time you understand it, it's awesome. I love that shock of recognition.
Trickery aside, I also loved the directing in general. Same director as Lost.
Only the last half hour is set in Shanghai, not most of the movie as I'd heard. If you've seen the trailers, you already know that Tom Cruise jumps off the Jinmao Tower. But the seriously freaky part is not that scene, but the one just before it where he is standing on the edge of a 200 meter drop, and the camera pans around to show the night-lit city far, far below. Aaaaaaaaaaaah ohmygodohmygod aaaaaaahhh. I saw this movie on an Imax screen. If it had been an Omnimax screen, I might not have survived.
Really beautiful urban scenery, in this and in another scene set at the Vatican.
Speaking of scenery: so, so many pretty people. *_* And Philip Seymour Hoffman was the best villain ever. So deadpan! Even tied up, he was frightening.
There is nothing to dislike about the love interest/plot device. At all. She's perfect, and even that isn't annoying. The second scene, at the engagement party, might have been my favorite, because it was so evocative. In five minutes I felt like I had watched an entire "my family interferes with my life because they care!" romantic comedy. It was insta!sympathy.
Low point was the secondary evil villain monologue. The guy used real current US foreign and domestic politics -- or at least a superficial version thereof -- to disjointedly explain his motivives in a way that didn't really make sense. I thought that was Tacky.
Overall a very fun movie whose plot I will probably not remember a month from now. But this is an unsustainable series, isn't it? Eventually Tom Cruise will run out of superiors to double-cross him and/or impossibly guarded buildings to break into. Not to mention the part where he can already take out whole elevators of specially-trained black ops using only a pen. If the producers keep trying to out-do themselves, subsequent movies are going to be very, very silly.
This summer I want to see:
The Inside Man
Superman Returns (omg the trailer looks SO GOOD.)
The Break-Up (ahahaha but. Vince Vaughn!)
***
Happy Cinco de Mayo! Happy Hikago Day!
I'm taking the history course. Thanks to everyone who answered the poll! The other course I'm taking is SLAVIC 320: Central European Films. I've never taken a film or art analysis course before, it's really cool (so many things I would never have noticed on my own the professor kindly points out to us) but also really disorienting, because although I blog about movies all the time I don't know how to discuss them academically. Where do you even start.