Cruise-a-thon

I pretty much knew what I was getting going in, so it's not like I can really complain. But I'm going to anyway, although it wasn't all bad. As far as eye candy, action/adventure, etc., the newly released Mission Impossible III is worth the $6 matinee ticket price. The first one is still the best, and the second one is total crap, but this one has its moments and is quite enjoyable (and I'm definitely not your action-flick type of girl, unless it's really intelligent). So, for the genre, it's pretty good. There are a couple very exciting, visually impressive sequences, but nothing memorable like the scene from the first one, where they break into the CIA and Cruise descends from the ceiling and tries not to let any drops of sweat fall, etc. -- you know the scene. There's nothing like that. But the main impression I was left with after the movie was frackin Tom Cruise, and more Tom Cruise. Blehch.

I really, truly think he must be a sociopath or a cyborg, because he seems soooo detached from authentic human behavior whether on screen or off, it's creepy. His stupid let-me-see-how-many-different-ways-I-can-look-intense face is on the screen so much, you're just dying for any little reprieve from it, like any time Philip Seymour Hoffman gets some screen time (not that much), or Simon Pegg -- from Shaun of the Dead -- who gets even less screen time, but is still hilarious in his two or three little moments and is the best thing in the movie. And I won't even get into the whole opening engagement party scene where everyone looks like they should be in a JCrew catalog or a Dockers commercial, and you don't buy for a second that these are a real group of friends and family. But, while I found myself snickering quite a bit, I did enjoy the movie, for the most part. Although it probably didn't help that I kept thinking of Stephanie Zacharek's review on Salon, which I've excerpted a bit of here, for your enjoyment:

Cruise is so busy squeezing out his hard little nuggets of feeling [I love that!] that he's incapable of letting anything in. Signal sent! Objective achieved! If there are other actors in the scene, Cruise hasn't noticed them. No one's going to sink his battleship.

...

"Mission: Impossible III" is clearly designed to be an action thriller with emotional underpinnings. But you can't get blood from a stone, no matter how hard you squeeze. And so Cruise, a huge box-office star, is the single bright, blinking emblem of the failure of "Mission: Impossible III." There are places where the movie feels molded and manipulated to up Cruise's sagging approval ratings with the public: Julia's girlfriends chatter about what a catch Ethan is; when he and Julia tie the knot in a hasty ceremony, he coyly pulls out the last-minute wedding rings he's procured -- they're plastic, and they have little pandas on them.

Cruise is working hard to play the kind of guy every woman wants, and the kind of guy every guy wants to be: He's manly enough to scale skyscrapers and blast thugs, but he's also a cuddly cutie-pie who knows that panda bears are the secret to getting a gal in the sack every time. And yet he's so focused, he's disengaged. In "Mission: Impossible III," the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, while Cruise groans and grunts through his acting regimen. Nothing is ever at stake with Cruise; he can't get outside of himself enough to make us believe that anything else matters. As Ethan Hunt, he's so busy trying to rock our world that he forgets he's supposed to be saving it.