Mission Impossible III

We need to make sure that J.J. Abrams has very good healthcare. We can't afford to lose him.

MI:3 is a definitive summer action popcorn flick. It never lets up, it all fits together, and it carries you through every minute. Just enough twists, but not too many. Satisfying action sequences that have it all -- they have gimmicks, shaky cameras, explosions, and fast cuts, but they also have energy, athletics, plot, suspense, and an unexpectedness that's rare in action flicks. None of them (well, maybe one) feel like it was shoved in to meet the action scene quota; they all feel like part of the story. The dialogue is crisp and witty and engaging.

(Incidentally, can someone ask the producer, director, and cinematographer from The Bourne Supremacy to watch this movie and then get in touch with the crew? I wish I could see the "steadicam version" of The Bourne Supremacy -- I would so pay for that DVD. (Aside to the aside: I had a dream a few weeks ago in which the third movie in the series came out, and was called The Bourne Complacency, and in the dream that seemed perfectly normal to me and everyone else.))

Okay, it's not all perfect. Ving Rhames is, as usual, sadly underused. There's one corny, clichéd scene (to avoid spoilers it's in rot13: gur PCE fprar arne gur raq) that wasn't any different from the thousand other times I've seen it. A few of the secondary characters we don't get to know as well as we might like.

Perhaps the best measure of an action movie is that sense you get with some of them, the good ones, that there was a lot more in it than could fit in one movie. As big as my TV is, I'm glad I saw this one in the theater.