Mission Impossible III (**3/4)

Employing acrobatics, stealth, and firepower, agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) aces three impossible missions and learns not to hide the truth from his new fiancée. Good for action fans.

This was a weird movie to see after the ultra-realistic Flight 93. Here, “IMF” [Impossible Mission Force] agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) concocts in an hour or two a series of break-and-enter missions that al-qaeda might have rejected as too complex. I guess the collective Islamofascist mind just can’t compete with good-old American know-how. Three such set pieces, and another sequence in which a barrage of artillery is unleashed against Hunt on a bridge, comprise the bulk of the action scenes, set on three continents. They’re pretty good, but not spectacular, and certainly not believable. At least two of them result in many dead bodies and explosions, though. The ever-versatile Philip Seymour Hoffman is the villain, who, as the movie begins, is threatening to kill Ethan and his beloved if he doesn’t get something called the Rabbit’s Foot. Also impressive is Laurence Fishburne as Hunt’s superior, who gets the best dialogue. (“I will bleed on the flag to make sure the stripes stay red.”) Directed by J.J. Abrams of Lost and Alias fame, this installment offers less character development than either of those TV series, but should satisfy action fans.

IMDb link

posted 8/20/13

Lord of War (**3/4)

This tries to do for the arms trade what Traffic did for drug dealing, though Blow, the Johnny Depp film, is probably a better antecedent. Nicholas Cage is the title character, who narrates his own rise from Ukranian immigrant to world-class gun peddler. The weapons trade is as worthy of examination as the drug trade, and I wanted to see this movie. I was never bored watching the story, but I never really felt like I’d learned much about the arms trade, the way I’d felt like I’d learning something about the drug trade after watching Traffic or Blow. To his credit, writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1mOne) never romanticizes his main character (a flaw in Blow), but neither does he provide the details that make such a character completely believable. For example, his fluency in Chinese and other languages is explained by saying that he had a gift for picking them up, as if a few chats with a foreign arms dealer would do the job.

Nor does Niccol go very far in explaining the motivations of wealthy nations in the arms industry, or the kinds of moral complexities that evil creates. The mostly Third World victims of war are shown as faceless hordes, though a fictional Liberian dictator is vividly portrayed. Bridget Moynihan plays a counterpart to Catherine Zeta-Jones’s role in Traffic, the trophy wife who’s happy not knowing the source of her lavish lifestyle. Ethan Hawke plays the lone lawman trying to get the goods on Cage.

IMDb link

circulated via email 9/22/05 and posted 11/19/13