Should I talk about Tom Cruise’s personal life? Should I? Should I?

Nah. I won’t. Go to some schlocky infotainment site if that’s what you’re after. I’m sure they have it covered.

Fool that I am, I had high hopes for Mission: Impossible III. The director, J. J. Abrams, is the creator of TV’s Lost and Alias, and his co-writers on M:i:III are also veteran Alias writers. It is no surprise that M:i:III feels like a remake of the pilot of Alias with Tom Cruise stepping into the Jennifer Garner role. Abrams also proved himself a great, visceral action director with the pilot episode of Lost, and we see a lot of that skill at work in the third installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise. What we don’t see a lot of is this filmmaking team’s gift for good storytelling.

The plot for all its bluster is simple and bland: Tom Cruise and his team have to apprehend Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian and obtain something known only as the Rabbit’s Foot. There are some mild surprises—nothing you wouldn’t expect from a film of this sort—and one of those not-quite surprises is that Hoffman is ridiculously good as the villain. At this point in time, we all should know that this man can play these kinds of roles.

Tom Cruise on the other hand seems like an alien trying to play a human on TV. Too much of the plot hangs on Ethan Hunt’s relationship with his wife, and it is a gigantic flaw that neither Cruise nor his co-star Michelle Monaghan can breathe any life into their romance.

The standout in the cast for me was Laurence Fishburne’s turn as John Brassel, the resident heavy at IMF, the organization that Hunt works for. He delivers fierce diatribes to his employees with eloquence and wit. Perhaps my favorite line of his: “Do not interrupt me when I am asking rhetorical questions.” The only problem is that there is not enough of him—or anyone else bearing the marks of compelling personality—in the film. I would have gladly given up whole chunks of the time we spend with the boring Mr. and Mrs. Hunt for some time facing off with Brassels or Hoffman’s Davian, who is perhaps even more criminally underused. These are two potentially very interesting characters that fade into the movie’s background to the film’s detriment.

While the film has some excellent action sequences, action alone is not enough. The story is not compelling, and there is also not a single mission that rivals the famous mission in the first Mission: Impossible, which had Hunt dangling from the ceiling to steal computer files. A lot of the action is flashy without being particularly suspenseful. There’s a lot that pops here, but in the end it is like a can of Coke that you shake up, open, and then drink: a lot of fizziness to begin with but going down it’s just flat and dull.

Welcome to your summer movie season.

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