Tom Cruise, (in)famous for keeping his private life private by suing people left and right, imploded for good beginning with 2005’s promotional appearances for Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. He jumped on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa several times and forced the talk-show host to play hand mercy. He told Matt Lauer that Lauer does not know the history of psychiatry but he (Cruise) does. He gushed and gushed and gushed about his romance with Katie Holmes, who has said that her childhood dream was to marry Tom Cruise (never mind the fact that he was married to Nicole Kidman for much of Holmes’s childhood). Basically, Cruise (and Holmes) just acted weird.

I liked the first two Mission: Impossible movies, so I was willing to give the third entry a chance despite my misgivings about Tom Cruise the person. However, J.J. Abrams was unable to contribute anything new to the material. MI3 is a re-hash of its predecessors in the worst possible way. The visual scheme has the same silver metallic sheen as the first movie without Brian DePalma’s sense of style or elegance. Abrams used slow motion very poorly, making me yearn for the breath-taking poetry of John Woo’s choreography.

The stunts and the plot are also lamely derivative. In MI3, Cruise plummets to the ground with a cable attached to his back, just like in the previous movies. He jumps out of a skyscraper and parachutes, just like in MI2. An action sequence set on a bridge plays like the bridge sequence in James Cameron’s True Lies (itself a re-make), only with drone planes instead of Harrier jets. The villain is a double-crossing inside man (MI). The mission is, once again, to retrieve a biochemical hazard (MI2). A lot of people blasted MI2 for having a lousy script. Well, MI3 has basically the same story as the first two big-screen outings, so logically, this one is a rip-off of “failures”. It makes no sense to dis-like the first two but to like this movie. Tom Cruise is short on tricks, and J.J. Abrams is a hack.

MI3 could've been called Felicity: After College. Keri Russell (who plays a Cruise protégé) and Greg Grunberg, members of the Felicity cast, appear in this movie because J.J. Abrams was one of the TV show’s creators. Michelle Monaghan, who plays Cruise’s love interest, is clearly Russell and Grunberg’s age. Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q are also young agents. This movie felt like a “documentary” about how exciting it is to join the clandestine service after getting your bachelor’s degree.

The movie also has (at least) two other odd references to Tom Cruise’s career choices. In one sequence, he has make-up that makes him look like Ron Kovic from Born on the Fourth of July. Cruise grins right at the camera, as if daring viewers to remember the Oliver Stone project. Also, while it’s logical for his character to masquerade as a priest in the Vatican, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that Cruise once studied to be a priest in real life.

MI3 was an attempt to show how “great” Tom Cruise is. His character will do anything to save his wife, even though sacrificing friends and family members is a routine thing in the line of duty. At the end of the movie, when everyone was cheering the happy couple, it felt like Cruise wanted to force us to accept his relationship with Katie Holmes. (Why didn't Cruise just cast Katie Holmes in the movie? Monaghan kinda looks like Holmes.)

What’s most disturbing is how the movie is a manifestation of how “extreme” Tom Cruise has become. Look at how he’s changed from MI to MI3. In MI, he was this nice, jolly, happy-go-lucky young man with bright prospects. In MI2, he was a slightly older man who tried to appreciate the finer points of life. In MI3, he seems to want to be the poster boy for extreme everything, from killing people (including himself) in order to save them to running and screaming in a bid to beat back the effects of aging. It is a very frightening transformation.

David McCoy