ShareThisBy MIKE PEARSON
Thursday, November 09, 2006
("Mission Impossible 3." Paramount. DVD-Blu-Ray. 125 min. Rated PG-13. $24.99/$29.99. Grade: B)
Ethan Hunt should be called the $60 million man.
He goes through at least that much hardware in "Mission Impossible 3," which finds IMF agent Hunt (Tom Cruise) traipsing the globe to stop an evildoer from profiting.
As "MI3" begins, Ethan is retired from field work and teaching. He's engaged to be married and looking forward to starting a family.
Then comes word that one of the agents he trained (Keri Russell) has disappeared in Berlin. Would he undertake one last rescue mission?
Quicker than a message can self destruct, he and his team are in action, but action turns out to be a double-edged sword. Ethan squares off against an arms merchant (a brilliantly malicious Philip Seymour Hoffman) trying to steal a top secret Chinese weapon. Those who cross him get hurt, as do members of their immediate family.
What is this to Ethan? Everything once the bad guys grab his wife and threaten to kill her if Ethan doesn't cooperate. Naturally he will _ up to a point.
You can't say "Mission Impossible 3" doesn't move. It begins with a helicopter chase and ends with a hectic car chase through the streets of Shanghai. In between, we visit Vatican City and Washington, D.C. Director J.J. Abrams gives us a travelogue with bullets.
The story isn't terribly original _ we never discover exactly what that stolen weapon is capable of _ and the supporting characters are the usual caricatures (Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup and the taciturn Laurence Fishburne). To complicate matters, there's a mole within the agency. Ethan can't be certain who to trust.
That's nice, you say, but does it pop? Is there sizzle in the action sequences? Does this movie get your blood pumping?
Quite simply, yes. The stunts may not be overly innovative, but once Ethan is on his mission, he's singleminded and ferocious. Cruise does rabid angst well; we feel for his character, especially after Hoffman injects a time bomb into his brain.
Four deleted scenes, a Cruise tribute and commentary make the extras predictable.
"Mission Impossible 3" is all about action. You want nuance? Read poetry.
("Nacho Libre." Paramount. DVD. 92 min. Rated PG. $29.99. Grade: C+)
I'd love to report that "Nacho Libre" is the funniest Jack Black film you'll ever see. It's not. It's amusing, mind you, but with a few caveats.
Black plays a friar at a Mexican orphanage whose passion is wrestling. He dreams of being a professional "luchador," body slamming his way to riches in the ring to feed the orphans back at the church. Just one problem: His fellow friars frown on the avocation.
So Nacho sneaks out at night, dons a mask and tights, and fights in amateur bouts. If only he were talented. He keeps getting schooled by all sorts of misfits.
Along the way he acquires a Sancho Panza in Esquelito (Hector Jimenez), a rail-thin street tough with a disarming world view. Their goal is to focus their energies on the ring, which might work if Nacho weren't taken with Sister Encarnacion, a new teacher at the orphanage. He flirts and she smiles sympathetically.
Eventually Nacho's superiors discover his secret life and banish him. How to get back in their good graces? Win a fight against the country's top wrestler. The prize money will feed the orphans for months.
"Nacho Libre" isn't belly laugh funny, but it's consistently offbeat. Black would be a fish out of water in his own house, and in Mexico his oddness really stands out.
The problem is that we never quite believe Nacho is in the wrestling game for the kids. His emotional connection with them is never established.
The slapstick humor here works fine; the verbal jokes? Not so much.
No matter. If you like Jack Black you'll find enough of his patented goofiness to keep you amused. If you don't like Jack Black, you probably stopped reading this long ago.
("Looking for Kitty." Think Films. DVD. 87 min. Rated R. $27.98. Grade: D+)
When his wife takes off in the middle of the night, small town baseball coach Abe (David Krumholtz) follows her to New York where he's heard that she's shacked up with an aging rock star. At his wits end, he hires gruff private eye Jack (Edward Burns) to find her. They are an unlikely pair, this rube and this ex-cop. Yet they have one thing in common: Love has disappointed them.
Abe and Jack have both been abandoned, one by a woman who ran away, and the other by a woman who died. They're wounded souls searching for salvation.
"Welcome to Looking for Kitty," a comedy by Edward Burns. Yeah, I know, there's nothing especially funny about the subject matter.
Nor, sadly, about the execution, which can best be described as droll. Burns gives us a lot of traffic shots of New York, as Jack shows Abe the sights and gives him an architectural history of the city. In Abe, Jack sees the passion he once felt. He also discovers that Abe and the errant Kitty may not have been right for each other.
Krumholtz gives a wonderful performance here as a man so sure of himself _ he's a baseball coach, after all _ that he's unwilling to accept the idea that someone could stop loving him. His desperation to find his runaway bride is touching.
It's just not funny, which makes "Kitty" less a comedy than a buddy movie with the occasional pithy moment. You expect a movie by Burns to have an edge. Instead this is 90 minutes of your life you'll never get back.
