Mission Impossible III

WARNING: Below may contain spoilers

I saw Mission Impossible III a couple weekends ago over my birthday weekend. By the way, thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes. Woo-hoo. I'm 29 now.

Anyway, say what you will about Tom Cruise and how he's gone Michael Jackson crazy these days, he can still make a thoroughly entertaining summer popcorn flick.

I was in the mood for a breathtakingly mindless film, and this definitely delivered. Tom Cruise is still a great leading man, and I'm embarrassed to say, still really hot. Mega-star that he is, he still has the ability to carry a movie without overshadowing the script or the action. And J.J. Abrams used all of his tricks from Alias, Lost and even Felicity to make the movie seem almost like a long episode from one of his shows, particularly and not surprisingly Alias, which is my most favorite TV show ever. J.J. starts the movie with a high-adrenaline, harrowing scene and then immediately cuts back to a couple weeks earlier in a flashback, like the beginning of so many Alias episodes. He even has an appearance by Greg Grunberg at the beginning in a house that looked very similar to Sydney's first house on Alias, where an engagement party was going on. The party was shot in a very Abrams-esque style with the slow motion and the wide smiles and the poppy music ("Best Of My Love" by The Emotions -- one of the greatest songs ever) playing in the background, while everyone was dancing. The rest of the movie uses all sorts of cool gadgets, with a cool Marshall-esque gadget guy, and has all sorts of intricate plot lines like a chase through a German wind farm, and blowing up a a beautiful Lamborghini in the middle of the Vatican after a kidnapping involving latex masks, spilled wine and a pretty convincing voice capture & replication.

Felicity appears in this movie too, and it's nice to see her brandishing some steel as a secret agent. I heard Scarlett Johanssen was originally supposed to play that role, but I'm glad Keri Russell played it instead, and I have to say, she looked great. Secret agent work suits her.

I learned some other things from this movie: 1) Shanghai looks like an awesome city; 2) A softball pitching machine comes in handy when you want to supremely annoy someone; 3) Tom Cruise can still run like the wind. Man, he's fast. 4) Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is my new celebrity crush, replacing Michael Vartan. Match Point started it. This movie cements it.

Probably the best thing about this movie is that it makes it easy to forget that Ethan Hunt in real life is a crazy Scientologist freak who knocked up Joey Potter. But this movie has great suspense, intrigue, thrilling action scenes, extreme stunts and everything else a summer movie should have. I thoroughly enjoyed it.