Mission: Impossible III is both exciting — at least while building to a climax that never arrives — and forgettable. Director JJ Abrams and his DoP Dan Mindel disguise the lack of ideas with nice pictures, indulging the "camera shake" school of action choreography at every opportunity.
Tom Cruise still looks good enough in extreme closeup to carry a film. His collaborative instincts, however, are hit-and-miss. Although Philip Seymour Hoffman is a superior actor, he isn't quite right for the role of an international arms dealer. With his up-in-the-air sentence endings and paunchy physique, he would be better cast as the CEO of an internet startup. But the Mission: Impossible franchise has already done the storyline about bad guys artificially inflating their stock prices.
The counterweight to Hoffman (with about as much screen time) is Simon Pegg, aka. Shaun of the Dead. He seems to have wandered in from a completely different film, and is amusingly out of place.
The film gets one thing right. We sense that the character in the suit talking about imposing "infrastructure and democracy" at gunpoint is intensely evil. And in that one surprising moment, this bland vanity project somehow taps into the zeitgeist.
I saw this digitally projected, which is basically like watching a large laptop.
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