My Take - Mission:Impossible III Movie Review

Tom Cruise is back as Impossible Mission Forces agent Ethan Hunt in the 2006 installment of the Mission: Impossible series. He is retired from field work in favor of training recruits, but when his best student (Keri Russell) is captured, he is forced back into the game. The screenplay is written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and J. J. Abrams, and is based on the 1988 television series created by Bruce Geller. The film is directed by J. J. Abrams, creator of television's Lost and Alias.

Agent Hunt, like any good agent, is living a secret life. To his friends, he is an engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation, spending his days studying boring traffic patterns. He is engaged to a nurse (Michelle Monaghan of Mr. & Mrs. Smith - 2005), who necessarily knows nothing about his other life. A major problem develops when his home life becomes intertwined with his work life, in the worst possible way.

The film's story line involves the search for and recovery of a "rabbit's foot,"; for Hunt, this rabbit's foot is very unlucky indeed. His adversary in this enterprise is Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) as Owen Davian, an unscrupulous and notorious black marketeer. Hoffman is so convincing in this villainous and cold-blooded role that one's perception of him as a man could subconsciously be altered. The perception of him as a very fine actor, however, remains unchanged.

Hunt's IMF team members consist of Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Alexander - 2004) as Declan, Maggie Quigley (Rush Hour 2 - 2001) as Zhen, and Ving Rhames (Baby Boy - 2001) as Luther. Billy Crudup (Almost Famous - 2000) plays Musgrave, the operative who draws Hunt into this fine mess, and Simon Pegg (Land of the Dead - 2005) plays Dunn, the electronics whiz who helps to get him out. Laurence Fishburne is John Brassel, the take-no-prisoners supervising agent. Although all of the support roles in the film take a back seat to the various explosions and chases, Fishburne in particular makes the most of his limited part.