Mission impossible 3 the latest iteration in the explosion heavy action spy film series. This time the plot revolves around Ethan hunt (tom cruise) who has retired from the field to become a teacher so he can marry his new girl friend Julia (Michelle Monaghan) getting pulled back in to help on one more op. The film starts with hunt in a pickle tied to a chair with the bad guy Owen Davian ( Philip Seymour Hoffman ) holding a gun to his mrs's head. The film then flashes back to show how things got so bad.

Ethan is living the good life training operatives planning to marry his girlfriend live happily ever after till old friend Musgrave (Billy Crudup) calls him back in. Ethan and his team, consisting of Luther Strickell (Ving Rhames), Declan (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and Zhen (Maggie Q ), are sent to rescue Ethans top student Lindsey Farris ( Keri Russell ) from arms dealing nutter Davian.

Things don't exactly go well and then Ethan gets a dressing down from the boss Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne). Hunt hatches a plan to snatch Davian for revenge or some such and pulls it off in Rome. Unfortunately Davian gets away when they get back to the US and fingers a pointed in Hunts direction. To make matters worse Davian has snatched Mrs Hunt and is threatening to kill her unless Hunt recovers some weapon of mass destruction or other.

Basically the plot is a fairly flimsy device that moves you from one outrageous explosion and gadget heavy action set piece to the next. Theres the usual mixture of betrayals and double crosses but nothing that is going to require a flow chart to work out this is definitely back of the postage stamp intrigue.

The cast is reasonable but I don't think any of them had their acting talent stretched at any point. One turn up for the books was Simon Pegg of Spaced/Shaun of the Dead fame as Benji a tech geek in IMF head quarters.

This is a run of the mill action film with lots of nice wire work martial arts explosions and gun play. Not too bad as an action film but if they want to keep doing this series they really should try and come up with some new ideas the last two have had the same basic save the girl motif under all the bumf.

Ah, another Mission Impossible film. Basically an excuse to set up Tom Cruise with a plethora of gadgets, point him at a bad guy and motivate suitably.

In this case the bad guy is an unflappable arms dealer with incredibly good connections and resources. He's also dubbed as being impossible to catch, which generally just encourages people to try (ask any roleplaying group...)

Basically after Ethan is given suitable cause to go off on one, in a suitably overcomplicated way. All very clever, but I don't understand why you need to get several different people in to a place in completely different ways... As is to be expected, things go a bit wrong at some stage and it ends up with the bad guy escaping and capturing Ethan (before the cry of "spoiler" goes out, I'm not telling you anything that's not in a flashforward at the start of the film.... even if you couldn't guess it anyway :D)

Overall, its a Mission Impossible film. There's some intrigue, some clever infiltration, lots of flashy gadgets and an infusion of explosions and guns. Does exactly what it says on the tin, but not much else...

Contents: Mission Impossible film, one. Suitable for vegetarians.