I don't watch movies much anymore. They've slowly become far more than my ass is willing to take -- too long, too derivative, not enough innovation, not enough to keep me interested. Besides, I'm supposed to be at home playing the Sims anyway.

But I will occasionally get dragged out there by Dr. Endy, who wants to see the newest flick and doesn't care that it's probably gonna suck. And so I ended up in the seats in front of Mission: Impossible III, and came out none the worse for wear.

In case you've only seen the trailer and care that it doesn't expose any plot (what trailer does?), here's the synopsis. Ethan Hunt (Tom "Xenu Is My Homeboy" Cruise) has stepped down from active duty with IMF, due to a newly-developed intimate romance with an outsider, and is now working as a trainer. However, his star pupil, Lindsey Ferris (Keri "I Was a Mouseketeer Too" Russell), has been taken hostage on her first mission, an effort to retain and subdue the bad guy (Phillip "Seymour" Hoffman), and so the boss dude (Billy "Who?" Crudup) thinks Hunt might be willing to take charge of the recovery team. Cue wacky hijinks.

The rest is your standard MI fare, with the masks and the high-wire antics and the explosions, but apparently my attention span has become so short that this is what it takes for me to enjoy a movie. No more can I be wooed into a three-hour single-camera effort that sticks grubby extras into John "Look, I'm Indie" Malkovich's head. I need a flimsy excuse for a plot that drives the action forward and lets me not obsess too much over catching every little detail lest I not understand the flick.

A strong suspension of disbelief is required for movies like this one, though. It managed to sustain the illusion pretty well, except for at one point. Hunt is trying to escape IMF custody, and at some point he gets hold of one of the security radios, impersonates the director (Laurence "Shallow Rabbit Hole" Fishburne) to throw the guards on the wrong track, and then jams the signal. By, according to some random dude (How "The Hell Should I" Know), "holding the button down." So wait a minute. This massive security initiative can be completely tied up by the same effort I used to force radio silence on my G.I. Joe walkie-talkie set from second grade? That's a government agency for you, I guess.

I have to be honest, though: the selling point to get me into the theater on the opening weekend was Keri Russell. Despite the years that have passed since I watched her religiously in everything (thanks to her cutting that awesome hair ... I felt so betrayed), the unabashed crush I had on her dating back to her MMC days and "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" apparently has not abated. I wasn't sure whether she could make up for the shorn locks, but five minutes of her racing around and shooting a gun with her hair grown back reassured me. (The next bit is spoilerish, so highlight the space below to reveal it.) When her character died twenty minutes into the movie, I turned to Dr. Endy (who had her own ulterior motive for going) and said, "That's not fair. My eye candy's already dead, but you get yours for the rest of the flick." Plus, she got DOUBLE prizes with the addition of Johnathan "I'm Running Out of Pithy Nicknames" Rhys Meyers. Yeah, Maggie "You Couldn't Pronounce It Anyway" Q was nice, but it's just not the same.

All in all, I enjoyed myself. I could tell because I wasn't paying more attention to my butt hurting from spending so long in a theater seat than to the screen. It's a tried-and-true method I've refined over the last year or so, which I refer to as the "Assometer." Not even a cushy new theater can fool the trusty Assometer (Harry Potter 4 can attest to that), so I may securely recommend MI3 (except for that stupid initialization the marketers came up with).

P.S. I know, I know. I'll get back to the Sims game, I promise. A new job that allows me to sit at a computer managing the personal details of hundreds of young people has zapped some of my desire to do it for fun.

Posted by Endymion at May 7, 2006 08:58 PM