Reel To Reel: Mission: Impossible 3 (M:I:3)

How It Rates: ***
Starring: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Action Violence, Mild Language, Mild Sex

M:I:3 lives by the mantra "He Who Has The Most Spy Gadgets Wins." It exists in the geeky spook universe where any problem is solvable with a cool piece of hardware -- like a three-dimentional printer that can clone Philip Seymour Hoffman's face. Forget about being John Malkovich. With a little more tweaking, perhaps we could modify the device to add some expressions into Tom Cruise's repotoire between panicked and cocky. And if that doesn't work, you can always blow something up.

The third film in the TV remake series finds Special Agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) training agents instead of carrying out impossible missions, about as close to a desk job he's likely to take. He's hooking up with a nurse who thinks he works for the Virginia Department of Transportation as a traffic engineer. And somehow, she believes him when he suddenly has to go off on a business emergency -- actually running off to Germany save a captured agent.

This agent happened to be tracking a real baddie: Owen Davian (Hoffman), the Darth Vader of arms dealers. He has The Big One -- something called the "Rabbit's Foot," a device we're led to believe is the mother of all biological weapons, yet compact enough to fit in your child's backpack. So Hunt needs to find Davian, find the Foot, and save the world -- hopefully before his steady figures out he's not analyzing vehicle congestion patterns.

The film works because it moves constantly, bouncing around the globe, executing missions with the fun-to-watch flair of a heist picture. So when it tries slowing down to add some dimension to Hunt and some romantic interludes, you want to say, "Get on with it, already!" Director J.J. Abrams angles this film to be something more than an action flick when it doesn't need to be. We don't want that picture. We want Cruise jumping off buildings, scaling walls, and hanging Hoffman's character outside a plane. As such, Hoffman doesn't have a lot of screen time to develop his character. But he does the best with what he has, being the believable villain without stepping into caricature.

For all of the things that get shot or exploded, Abrams shows a rare bit of restraint at one point in the picture, where Hunt actually has to steal the Rabbit's Foot. This could have easily turned into a clone of a scene from the first picture of the series but Abrams works neatly around it.

According to Fox News' Roger Friedman, M:I:3 is causing some anxiety at Paramount because the $150 million pic did only $47 million on opening weekend. But remember, this isn't including the take from overseas, where Cruise isn't carrying the cross of the couch incident. By my estimation, the picture will need $400 million to break even, hardly an impossible mission, even by Hollywood accounting.