"Mission Impossible 3" was a well made and entertaining popcorn flick. It's a lot better than 80% of what passes for a summer movie these days, but let's face it, it's a summer movie through and through.

Let's tackle the elephant in the room first. I don't want to completely give the guy a free ride, but I think people have been overly harsh on Tom Cruise. I know he kind of wigged out on Oprah and he got into a relatively unnecessary debate with Matt Lauer on "The Today Show," but he seems to be a relatively decent, if not full of himself, person. I think he enjoys making all kinds of movies and seems to throw himself into any role he gets. And when it's all said and done, he's the only actor of his generation who has worked with every director who's meant anything to the past 30 years. Spielberg, Scorsese, Kubrick, Coppola, Reiner, Mann, etc.

That being said, one of the things that really bugs me about Tom Cruise is his new relationship. I don't so much object to the relationship outright, and who am I to rip into how someone loves another person. But here's the thing; before the movie, the Alamo Drafthouse showed Tom Cruise's infamous Oprah appearance. The jumping on the couch thing is kind of odd, since most people celebrate their love more inwardly than outwardly, but what really bugs me is the body language the two of them exhibit when they're together. He's very much in her physical space, and she looks all the more uncomfortable because of it. It's very reminiscent of the way Lisa Marie Presley looked anytime Michael Jackson would try to get a smooch off her in public.

The relevance for this review? Well, one of the things JJ Abrams (MI3 director and writer) wanted to do with this movie was show more of a personal side to Ethan Hunt's character. It's all good and fine to do this, but having the baggage that he does, they should have cast an actress who looks a lot different than Katie Holmes in both physical appearance and age. I swear, Michelle Monaghan might as well have been Katie Holmes since the relationship the fictional characters is almost identical to the relationship between Cruise and Holmes.

But luckily, the relationship didn't really have that much to do with the plot. Well, it had a lot to do with the plot, but they really weren't on screen together all that much.

The script was well written. It wasn't overly complex, but it did have a few pleasant surprises thrown in that kept me interested.

The most surprising and wonderful thing about "Mission Impossible 3" was that unlike the previous two films, their was an actual IMF TEAM that worked with Ethan Hunt, instead of it just being Ethan Hunt versus all the baddies. I like seeing spy movies where there are a lot of moving parts going on, and this movie had a lot of pretty intense scenes involving the team. The Vatican scene was particularly good.

The action in the movie was pretty intense. When you watch as many summer blow-up fests as I do, it becomes REALLY easy to tell which directors have the eye for a good action set piece. JJ Abrams seems to have well crafted action set pieces coming out of his pores. Each of the action scenes seemed to be pretty suspenseful, with little splashes of cleverness thrown in for good measure. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the action in this movie is highly unrealistic in the realm of what could possibly happen in real life, but Abrams did a good job at walking a fine line between making it so fake that it's cheesy, and making it stylized enough that you remember that it's just a movie.

And I have to mention that Philip Seymour Hoffman was wonderful in the part. Too often with movies like this (and James Bond movies too), the movie becomes all about the action star, while the villain is an afterthought. But I thought they did a pretty good job at making Hoffman pretty memorable. I liked that he was just an up and up hard ass bastard. And I liked that they gave Hoffman, who usually stars in pretty low budget indie stuff, enough scenery for him to chew on.

So yeah, it's a pretty good movie. I tell you what, at the end of this movie, I really wanted to go home and rent "Alias," since a lot of the people who have seen both the movie and the series have said that the movie is basically exactly like an episode of Abrams' series.

matt out