Exactly what the fans have been expecting since the last Mission Impossible – six years ago.  Perhaps it’s even a bit more than fans were hoping for.  There are plenty of effects and stunts but this time hero, Ethan Hunt, has a wife.  The writers are trying to ‘personalise’ this successful movie franchise.

In reviewing Mission Impossible, we can’t help reviewing Tom Cruise.  Without him, the film would not be nearly so popular.  One of the first observations is that he has been making films for twenty five years.  He began as a teenager in Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love in 1981.  By the time he was twenty one, he had made an impression in Risky Business.  Twenty years ago he starred in the top grossing film of 1986, Top Gun.  He hasn’t looked back.

Yet, despite his popularity with the public, he is frequently the subject of ridicule and slander.  The fact that he became a Scientologist, and an earnestly proselytising one at that, has not endeared him to many Christians.  He spent a year of his schooling at a Franciscan juniorate.  His religious beliefs and outspoken statements on all kinds of topics incur the ire of many sceptical and secularist commentators.  His over-enthusiasm and television antics on the Oprah Winfrey Show for Katie Holmes and the recent birth of their child has lead to a mockery and some heavy satire on War of the Worlds and the Oprah show in Scary Movie 4.

Yet, he survives this criticism and has toplined popular films for two decades.

Many of the reviews of Mission Impossible III tend to stay with some of the observations made here and let them influence the judgment on the film.  However, if we are more objective and look at the film as a film, we have to say that this is audience-satisfying action spectacle.

Once Lalo Schifrin’s well-known and distinctive score begins, we know what we are in for.  Fans of the old television series will welcome the return of Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt.  He is the straight-arrow American hero.  He is fitter than most people – and so is Cruise himself who does his own stunts and can be seen scaling buildings or leaping from them, hurtling across bombed bridges and even a long take of Cruise fast- sprinting along a riverside road.  He is a great stimulus for making resolutions to exercise!

Ethan Hunt is also ingeniously intelligent and can plan what the publicity calls ‘mind-bending’ missions for rescuing imprisoned agents in deserted Berlin warehouses or abducting the arch-villain from a high-flyers reception in the Vatican. His car is subject to bombardment on the Chesapeake Bay bridge. At the end, he confronts the enemy to rescue his wife in Shanghai.  The locations give an exhilaratingly international flavour to the film.

The Vatican sequence, however, needs better technical advice than the producers got.  Our hero scales the Roman wall and disguises himself as a priest in the Vatican gardens – except that wardrobe has inexplicably given him a black skullcap that no one wears in the Vatican.  Instead of being unobtrusive as intended, he would stand out as quite different.  But, as the producers of The Da Vinci Code keep reminding us, ‘it’s only a fiction’.

One of the puzzling aspects of the Mission Impossible films is how all the required equipment simply turns up as needs be.  In the first film, the fact that Ethan Hunt happened to have a mask of Jon Voight in his pocket strained credibility.  At least we see the mechanics of making the masks here – though how Tom Cruise gained the villain’s height and weight in a split second defies suspension of disbelief.

Cruise has always surrounded himself with distinguished cast members.  The ruthless villain this time is Philip Seymour Hoffman who has just won his Oscar for Capote.  Ving Rhames is back on the team and is joined by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a reckless Irishman.  Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup are the Washington officials and Michelle Monaghan adds some glamour as Mrs Ethan Hunt.

Mission Impossible III is also a comment on today’s audience.  Millions of us really go for big, noisy, colourful, explosive action.

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