Lost
director JJ Abrams trowels it on thick, summer-flick style.
Watching Tom Cruise onscreen isn't so much a cinematic experience as it is a sociological one, recalling an infuriated Peter O'Toole in
My Favorite Year
: "Damn you, I'm not an actor-I'm a movie star!" For Mr. Cruise doesn't
act
as much as he does wear clothes,
***image1***
say things and move around. Some of these he does better than others (particularly the moving around-the running, the leaping, the rolling and the punching), but he's never really anyone other than five-foot-six Tommy Mapother, former seminary student from New Jersey.
Which is just fine, usually, the non-acting; since there aren't usually any strenuous thespian demands placed upon him (unless Kubrick kidnaps him for 400 days, or PT Anderson coaches the living engrams out of him), there's no need for Tom to wax histrionic, any more than Keanu needs to try his hand at
Henry IV
.
And sure enough, the weakest points in
M:I-3
appear congruent with Cruise's efforts in the service of Dramatic Acting. In other words, this is the
Mission: Impossible
installment in which Ethan Hunt gets mushy on us. "I thought it was critical that the audience be able to connect with him in terms of his vulnerability and his humor and his fears and his desires," says television's JJ Abrams, of his decision to rescript the sequel, foregrounding his main character's sensitive side rather than the running, the leaping, et cetera.
Alas, Abrams learned nothing from the 007 series, which like the Roman Empire became decadent, flabby and bloated once we began to learn more than we wanted to know about James Bond's personal history. In the hiatus after Connery, when George Lazenby depicted a besotted, matrimonial Bond, the series faltered and only regained its footing when Moore took us safely back into Fleming's absurdist,
***image2***
archaic world, replete with phallocentric gadgetry and meaningless sexual conquest. If we want art, we'll read Tolstoy; we want Bond skiing downhill on a cello case, dammit!
So when
M:I-3
cuts from an opening sequence that will literally dry your mouth with nervous anticipation (Hunt negotiating frantically with a heavy-lidded, jaded Philip Seymour Hoffman in a nerve-wracking stichomythia) straight to…an engagement party for Ethan and his bride Julia (Michelle Monaghan, doing what she can with a lame part), you may find yourself indulging in very loud eye rolls. You may also wonder how long Julia has for this earth; if you hear distant strains of Louis Armstrong promising, "We Have All the Time in the World"…well, just sit tight.
At least Abrams gets us promptly moving again, with Hunt summoned out of his love-nest retirement to extract an operative (Keri Russell) captured by Hoffman, who is apparently a doer of international evil deeds-of what sort exactly, we fail to learn; but it hardly matters. There are, you see, helicopters to blow up, buildings off which to base-jump, a rock 'n' roll team of crack IMF experts to assemble (Ving Rhames reprising Luther Stickell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers as hotshot pilot, an underused Maggie Q on weapons and, given the best lines as the computer geek, Simon Pegg)-and absolutely contrived plot lines to pursue all the way to "
BERLIN GERMANY
," "
ROME ITALY
" (Tom wears a cassock!) and "
SHANGHAI CHINA
"-titles which helpfully forestall any geographic confusion we might feel.
Never mind about all the
other
confusion, because hey-any less silly, and we'd be disappointed. We
want
to watch Tom take a running dive off a night-lit skyscraper; if we wanted to watch him enact strong emotion convincingly, we'd watch breakfast television. Since it's sadly nigh impossible to set aside the star's public-nutbar image, we might as well wallow in the self-referential spectacular flapdoodle of
M:I-3
, plastered on so gleefully by Abrams.
