Mission super-Impossible III

Why a quality actor like Phillip Seymour Hoffman would play the bad guy in the third iteration of Mission Impossible III is the question that is going around in my head since I saw the movie this weekend. Don’t get me wrong…the movie is not bad…much better than the second one but nowhere near the first one. To put it simply, the first one rocked, the second one sucked and the third just about manages to keep you interested. The far-fetched shenanigans not withstanding, the movie is an almost-taut action flick, right until the last scene,which completely ruins a praise-worthy attempt at a taut action flick. Tom Cruise electrocutes himself to diffuse an explosive charge implanted in his brain (through the nasal passage, no less) and then after a full five-minute shoot-out, his girl-friend/wife manages to revive him (without any brain damage) before which the inimitable Mr.Cruise makes like Spiderman, jumps of one skyscraper in (awesome) Shanghai tethered by a cable and after reaching the end of it, swings in a long arc and jumps off onto the neighboring skyscraper, slides down its sloping roof, shoots a couple of Chinese bad guys, steals the “rabbit’s foot”, jumps through a window, with a parachute which barely opens, crashes into a lower floor through its window, gets dragged out by the parachute again, hangs inches above the street after the parachute snags on a light pole, drops the “rabbit’s foot” which then rolls out into the street amidst traffic with Cruise dodging fast moving vehicles running helter-skelter after it. He gets picked up and jumps right into another chase between the bad guys in which he leans out of the car shoots out the tires from the bad guys’ car which is about three cars behind. Whew…I actually remembered all that…so the movie was not bad. Oh yeah…another wasteful use of a quality actor, Laurence Fishburne has a grand total of ten minutes of screen time and a total of 8 minutes of dialogue…

testing