I've spent the day expecting that, at any moment, the car driving by me will explode. I've been amazed at the lack of long, dramatic jumps I've had to make (only three so far) and nobody has responded to my code conversations. What the hell. Why may you ask (didn't you read the title of this article)?
Why, indeed it is because I saw, in my desire to expand myself intellectually and culturally, "Mission: Impossible III -- The Mission Begins." The scene opens and we see Tom Cruise, front tooth still in the middle of his face regardless of rumors of corrective dentistry, looking crazy (or normal, I can't tell with him these days) and frantic and bound to a chair with a large, portlier-than-usual Phillip Seymour Hoffman standing in front of him, holding a gun to a woman's head.
My first thought: Jesus, I love Phillip Seymour Hoffman. And I do. Really and truly. As portly as he may be, if he asked me to spend the rest of my life by his side, skipping from quaint town to quaint town making wonderfully subtle movies (and the occasional blockbuster to pay the bills), I would. But my love is strictly platonic (excepting the cuddling, because there would be lots of cuddling, I might even let him be the big spoon).
Anyway, back to the movie. This scene turns out to be one of the last scenes in the chronology of the story. The movie moves back to a time before this trouble and sweatiness, back to a lovely party in Tom Cruise's house, where we get to see the agent in his homely element. Aw, isn't he adorable and domestic with a woman who keeps looking strangely like Liv Tyler but isn't? So this movie pulled a Tarantino. I'm not angry. It works. Whatever.
Okay, it irked me a little -- stuck in my craw, if you will. You might not ... right, movie. The movie goes on from there to follow a fairly mundane, or at least tried and true, storyline: agent turned teacher of agents goes back into the force, one mission turns into another, bad guy is really evil and looks like he's going to win, then there's the twist. Yep, we've seen it, but you know what? It's good.
What this movie lacks in original storyline, it makes up for in spectacular dialogue. Let me just preface the rest of this article by saying where the basis of my opinion lies. My all time favorite action movie is "Broken Arrow," starring Cruise's fellow scientologist John Travolta and the other man with whom I would spend the rest of my life (though, I would be mildly creeped out the whole time), Christian Slater. Yeah, I said it, I think he's great, in part due to how damn creepy he is. Anyway, that is the perfect action movie. It has suspense, witty dialogue, dire consequences, a quirky evil guy, personal vendettas, a mine shaft and barely any mushy love scenes or drives. Also, the girl is kind of ugly and that brings me joy for some reason -- or maybe it's hope. Whatever. So that film sets the standard and, for the most part in the dialogue department, "Mission" is on par. I'm just going to give you a taste: Ethan (Tom Cruise) scales the wall of the Vatican using a Batman-like gadget (speaking of which I want gadgets! Where are my f-ing gadgets! I'm sick of having to use the mundane fork or car or body, I want explosives that fly around and a portable brain scanner!) and, upon reaching the top and totally throwing the surveillance camera for a loop, imparts a great one-liner: "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall." Not the whole rhyme, just that one line.
Why? To tell you the truth, I don't know. One can look at it and say that perhaps the nursery rhyme is an allegory for his entire situation. He is, metaphorically and physically, on a wall, ready to fall, and if he does there will be no kings men, nor horses, nor government agency, that will be able to put him back together. The entire the movie is full of these one-liners that have no point except to perhaps relieve the crowd's tension or allegorically clue the audience into a deeper sides of action movie screenwriters. And they make this movie.
Well them and the explosions. There are some great explosions; lots of cars exploding and flipping and totally causing another car to explode. On top of the explosions, there are falling endangered animals, enflamed helicopters, and one (only one, I was disappointed) slow-motion shot from below an impossible jump.
There are lots of women who get beat up throughout the movie (all of them are brunettes and all of them kind of look like an actress but aren't) and there are two (count them two!) suspensions! You know, when Ethan hangs like a spider from the ceiling. Two of them!
There are some great stereotypes (another requirement of the large scale action movie). There's the big, gruff, heart-of-gold black man (he gets a good amount of the witty one-liners). There's the bumbling, techy Brit who rambles on (like we know all Brits do) about his studies at Oxford and makes vaguely British jokes that would be funny to any true British comedy follower but remain merely palatable for the average American (no offense). There's the all-purpose hot Asian who sluts herself out for the sake of the force. There's even the table full of silent, card-playing, aged Chinese men! So necessary.
To end, I'll remark on some of the things this movie made me question and some things that it made me realize.
1) I am a tad bit paranoid. I kept being afraid that the film was brain washing me into being a scientologist (there is a long speech at the end that is suspiciously patriotic, but not quite in the way I want to be, rather in the way that says give money to free the alien inside of you).
2) Where are all of these empty warehouses and electrical plants and why can't I own one?
3) I am getting old. Throughout the movie I would respond to Cruise's risky, life-threatening decisions not with a high five to my fellow moviegoers or a "hell yah," but a desire to see him choose the logical path and head back to the party where he would have a perfectly mundane conversation about traffic patterns and then a nice calm life. I would watch that. How sad is that?
4) I've decided to learn how to read lips. If you have any knowledge of how I would go about doing this, please contact me. Screw school, I'm going to be an agent for the Impossible Missions Force (yeah, that's what IMF is ... somebody got tired, I guess, and couldn't think of a better acronym).
Rating: Three fourths of a "Broken Arrow." Worth $10 plus a couple extra for popcorn to eat when under stress.
