….opens with two strong actors competing for ‘best performance’ as they display their impeccable screen skills. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, who is kidnapped by (fresh-off-of-Oscar win) Philip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian, your standard-issue evil mastermind. Their battle revolves around a briefcase with a device in it called a “Rabbit’s Foot,” though it feels more like the Energizer Bunny, because these two keep going and going and going. One has to wonder when they have time to use a bathroom or gulp down a coffee. Katie Holmes look-alike Julia (Michelle Monaghan) is Cruise’s wife in the storyline, and at the climax she ends up being the ultimate blackmail device. Billy Crudup plays John Musgrave, a colleague on the mission force who switches between seeming good and bad so often that I’m still not sure which he’s supposed to be. The same can be said for Lawrence Fishburne, playing the mission force’s commander-in-chief. Our mission, meanwhile, is to figure out where the suspense went. Cruise moves along flawlessly with nary a scratch, scaling buildings, dodging bullets, seeming almost mechanical as he crashes through windows. Since nothing ever seems to threaten him, we never have the fun of fearing for him. Never questioning whether he’ll live through all his death-defying exploits, we have plenty of time to wonder how deep the pockets in his jeans are. He has cell phones, explosives, guns, knives, you name it stashed in his pants as he sprints in what seems like seconds from Virginia to Berlin to China, dispensing nasty stares as he strains the seams of his tight T-shirt. Wouldn’t airport security stop him? I can’t even get an emery board through check-in! But once you get past the “how could he do that?” or “where did he get that?’ questions, you’ll find the movie a pure popcorn-bag of entertainment. The movie’s biggest goal, of course, is to make sure we all still like Tom Cruise, given his recent history of couch-hopping, Brook Shields scolding, and scientology preaching. That might be the real mission impossible. THREE CROWNS
