Sometimes the best way to review a movie is to summarize it. Here’s a summary of Mission: Impossible III:

Ethan Hunt is aging but he is still the best fucking spy in the world. He’s in a committed, live-in relationship with a doctor and he’s excited but nervous to meet her family. She thinks he works for the department of transportation.

Well, it turns out that the IMF still calls on Ethan sometimes, to train new agents and also to go rescue the agents he’s trained when they get captured by intense international terrorists played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Ethan plans a complicated mission and succeeds in rescuing Keri Russell but she promptly dies because she has an explosive charge implanted in her brain.

Keri Russell sent Ethan a special encrypted message before she died indicating that she suspects the leadership at the IMF of being in cahoots with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, so he doesn’t tell them about his mission to capture Hoffman by infiltrating the Vatican, standing in as a decoy Hoffman while his apprentice agents kidnap the real guy, and blowing up an orange Lamborghini for some reason. But Hoffman escapes when an army of masked, uniformed men make a bunch of explosions on a bridge.

Because he overheard Ving Rhames mention Ethan’s first name, Hoffman is able to immediately find Ethan’s wife and kidnap her, demanding that Ethan retrieve the mysterious super weapon he’s after to pay for her release. So Ethan finds the mysterious super weapon and then gets kidnapped by Hoffman himself. Luckily his wife who is suddenly surprisingly proficient with a pistol rescues Ethan from several armed terrorists and defuses the explosive charge in Ethan’s head with a makeshift defibrillator. Meanwhile the IMF leadership guy who was working with the terrorists the whole time gets away, I guess. The end.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is terrifying in this movie which plays into a major fear existent in the American public at the time of this film’s release: terrorists don’t have personalities, causes, or morals, they just want to wreak havoc. I’m not sure if this has ever been true but it makes for a compelling villain who isn’t bothered by anything and who is completely unrelenting. I guess if he is motivated by anything it is money since he wants to sell the mysterious super weapon that is never fully explained but even that isn’t explored by the plot.

He is purely evil, which I think is what fascinated JJ Abrams by this storyline: the franchise is called Mission: Impossible for god’s sake and he wanted to present his audience with an Impossible villain. I suppose you could interpret something from the fact that the unflinching, meticulous villain is motivated solely by coin but I’ll leave that to the English majors. Oh wait I am an English major.

Unfortunately, outside of the late PSH the movie is a mess. There are 3 or 4 of the franchise’s signature heist sequences but none of them are as grandiose or as well executed as the ones in the first two films, and the plot is a constant moving target where the surprises just further confuse your understanding. There are also a ton of characters with their own personal stories which in theory sounds interesting but in practice makes the movie feel super muddled and unfocused. Simon Pegg, Jonathan Rhys Myers, Lawrence Fishburne and even Aaron Paul play significant roles but they are all more bewildering than captivating.

Hey, you know who else is in this movie? Tom Cruise! Cruise’s influence has always been noticeable in the M:I franchise but I think this is the film where it started being more about Cruise than the directors (as mentioned in previous reviews, the first movie was a very stylized noir by Brian DePalma, and the second one was heavily influenced by action-master John Woo). The central conflict in M:I III, as well as its style and character development, are all based around the idea of Cruise as a loving, family figure, to his wife, to his protege Keri Russell, and to the other agents on his team. You can only believe that Simon Pegg would betray orders from his supervisors to help Cruise’s character, or that the newly minted Mrs. hunt would trust his frequent last minute “business trips” to important DOT expos, if he was a loving, loyal companion to everyone close to him.

I don’t particularly mind that this seems to run a bit contrary to the Ethan Hunt of the first two films because I feel that each M:I movie kind of stands on its own, sort of like the pre-Daniel Craig Bond movies – they are set in the same universe and have similar characters but the storyline and circumstances are different each time and the characters can be augmented in service of the plot. The thing that I mind is that the movie isn’t very good, and I wonder if Ethan had remained a maverick with a raw, obsessive commitment to the Mission firstly and solely, if this plot line, with the Hoffman character, could have worked.

Instead, this seems like another movie in service of Cruise’s early-aughts obsession with portraying himself as a human being. You can see ties to the Oprah interview, and War of the Worlds, and Minority Report.

This raises an interesting question though: what is the appropriate way for a movie star to age?

Next: Lions for Lambs