Common Sense

After a weekend full of delays, the Common Sense Crew made it to our local eyesore megaplex just in time for the 1 p.m. showing of Mission Impossible III.

I had hoped against hope that I was wrong in my dire predictions that this movie would suck major donkey dong would be wrong. I was disappointed.

First of all, after waiting in line at the concession stand for several minutes, I was informed that the hot dogs were not ready. Movie theater hot dogs aren’t the best, but the price is right and they are pretty darn good when you are hungry and want to watch a movie. I had to sulk away with only a medium Coke.

I had to sit through a trailer for another mindless CGI movie about talking animals or things or whatever, voiced by several major movie stars. The world would have gone on spinning without all these damn movies, but if even one more gets made, I will build a doomsday device myself.

Finally, after the customary ten minutes of commercials, the movie starts. It would be more accurate to say that moving pictures are flashed on a screen since this movie doesn’t really start or go anywhere except maybe in reverse.

This movie is a rehashing of things I’ve already seen before. When Tom Cruise is sliding down the glass roof in Shanghai, I realized Jackie Chan had already done that in Who Am I? Laurence Fishburn’s character? Just another black captain of the police force whose tired of “rogue” cops/secret agents blowing things up and not going by the book. Lethal Weapon anyone? The magnetic explosives that zoom through the air? Cruise might as well have been carrying a golf bag like Bruce Willis did in Hudson Hawk.

Even the fact that we never really find out what the “rabbit’s foot” is comes straight out of Pulp Fiction.

It’s like the screenwriters just raided a Blockbuster one weekend and thought they could get away with it.

To punctuate the ripped off plot elements, there is action sequence after action sequence. It’s possible that I’ve got that backward and the ripped off plot elements just gave them an excuse to make a multi-million dollar movie with lots of explosions.

There’s nothing wrong with explosions, but all that action is totally at the expense of plot and character development. Watching this movie I had absolutely no connection with any of the characters. I didn’t care if Philip Seymour Hoffman killed Cruise’s love interest played by Michelle Monaghan. I knew absolutey nothing about her and the story never told me why I should care.

The two additions to the IMF team don’t get much sympathy from me either. There’s just no personal connection to keep me interested in their welfare.

This movie was just about blowing things up on a bridge (just like in True Lies) and jumping off a building with a parachute (a twin-tower skyscraper in Asia, just like Entrapment). If I wanted to see things blow up, I could watch an episode of Mythbusters. At least then I would feel like I maybe learned something. After sitting through two hours of this, I actually feel like I lowered my IQ.

And if I had not paid the matinee price, I would have felt like I had been ripped off and demanded my money back. To cap it all off, we walked out of the theater, went back to the concession stand and tried to finally buy our hot dogs. The stand was closed and they wouldn’t sell us any. That makes no sense! If you don’t sell the hot dogs before the movie, and you don’t sell them after the movie’s over, when the hell do I get my hot dog?

Space Monkey wanted me to say something to the effect that if you thought you would like it, you will. I would rather say ‘If you like plot, story, cinematography, characterization, orginality or acting, by all means avoid this movie like you think Tom Cruise has bird flu.’

I give this movie the lowest rating since I started giving ratings, 1 out of 5 cherry bombs.