In this movie, Tom Cruise needs to act like he is madly in love with a brunette, and must frequently act like his emotions are completely out of control. Yeah… quite a stretch.

Spoiler Alert.

The first “mission” starts out like a traditional IMF assignment, Tom gets a disposable camera that scans his retina and gives him (and us) the exposition. Get it? “exposition”, “camera”. After the message is over, the camera self-destructs in proper IMF fashion (puff of smoke). I guess it was a self-disposable camera. The puns keep on coming.

They are off to Berlin to rescue a captured IMF agent. But the execution of the mission is very non-IMF in style. No subtlety, no finesse, nobody wears a disguise; they essentially riddle an entire building with bullets in order to rescue that agent. Sounds like a job for the A-Team, not IMF.

Once he’s back in the US, we switch to a rooftop scene where Tom and his girlfriend have a “relationship talk”… zzzzz… huh, what? They’re in front of a priest now, getting married. Apparently Tom lost out during the talk.

Anyway, off to Italy we go, the Vatican, to be 0.44 square kilometers exact. This mission is about capturing the bad guy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, without all the other bad guys knowing that he’s been captured. Now this is more in the IMF style. There are several disguises, people get drugged, there’s a camera hidden in a powder case, etc… It starts with Tom and an accomplice faking a mechanical failure of their truck to stop traffic just outside the Vatican. To make it believable, they argue in Italian… that made me think… Nobody ever talks calmly in Italian; it can only be used to express complete and utter hatred, or undying love.

Tom jumps on top of a wall and tricks the security cameras by putting a static picture in front of it. What kind of lens is on that camera? It can focus on a picture 2 inches away? He then jumps down the other side of the wall by carefully calculating the length of rope needed so that he can do the “stop inches from the floor” bit like he did in the first Mission Impossible movie. Maybe they still hold the copyright on that trick, so they figured they’d use it again.

He’s now disguised as a priest, a Scientology Priest, I assume. He nods and crosses his way down to the Vatican’s computer room (rarely included in the tour packages, btw) where Padre Tom hacks into the security server with his Holy HTC Wizard. This way they can move around the Vatican without being seen.

The gorgeous team member, not Tom!, the female gorgeous team member walks around Philip and takes pictures of his face. She uploads the pictures to the rest of the team who feed them into the “insta-mask” device. In two minutes, they have a flawless rubber mask replica. Tom puts it on and goes off to his trailer because Philip will now take care of both roles. He meets himself in the bathroom and after a brief struggle; he wins by knocking himself unconscious. Then Philip leaves the party with the gorgeous female team member (I’m sure she had a name, just can’t remember it) and they escape through the bottom of their Lamborghini into a sewer manhole, and then blow up the car. This way, the other bad guys think Philip is dead. After all, there’s no reason to be suspicious. Lamborghinis explode all the time while parked on the street.

We now switch to somewhere in the US (judging by the number of SUVs on the road) where Philip’s henchmen use overwhelming force to rescue him. Apparently, they didn’t buy the whole exploding Lamborghini story. They also kidnap Tom’s girlfriend, excuse me, wife. That makes him mad, now it’s personal. His IMF boss orders him captured and brought back for interrogation. They manage to hold him for about 15 minutes before he too, escapes. Seriously, if three security guards are tasked with transporting a prisoner, you’d think at least one of them would be looking in the general direction of the prisoner.

In another dizzying shift of locale, we are now in China.

In order to save his wife, he needs to deliver the McGuffin device (look it up) to Philip. That device is capable of ending life on Earth as we know it, or so we are led to believe. And Tom decides that saving his wife is worth handing it over to the bad guys. His logic goes something like: “If I don’t give it to them, she’ll be dead anyway”. Ermm… hello? There’s like 6 billion other people on Earth, can we have a vote? We don’t all have a God who can provide us with spaceships.

Tom needs to steal the McGuffin device (have you looked it up yet?) from some Chinese military sub-contractor. They have military sub-contractors in China? It’s amazing how quickly young capitalists grow up, isn’t it? This mission is so far-fetched that they don’t even bother showing us most of it. We see Tom jump on the roof, and then he jumps out a window with a parachute. Somewhere in between there, he went down to the sub-sub-sub-basement, stole the McGuffin device, and then went back half-way up the building. All this in 5 minutes. Inside of a military sub-contractor’s building with high security. I guess the movie is getting kind of long; they had to hurry things along.

Tom goes to deliver the McGuffin device to Philip, he gets captured, but not to worry, nobody stays captive for very long in this movie. But he does get a bomb inserted in one of his body cavities. Philip says it’s in his nose, but from the way Tom runs later on, I suspect it was inserted somewhere else. To stop the bomb, he needs to electrocute himself, so that means the wife needs to do all the butt-kicking until the end of the movie.

I’m worried. Every Chinese movie I’ve seen lately has had less and less Kung Fu in it. Very troubling. At least the Laws of Physics are still regarded as Suggestive Guidelines of Physics.

This is also a subtitled movie, which means I had to read the movie. If I wanted to read a story I’d… I… well I wouldn’t!

This book-on-celluloid tells the story of semi-God beings who are imbued with amazing speed and strength, yet are very peaceful and enlightened. They come from the Land of Snow. I had no idea the Chinese thought so highly of Canadians. Kinda makes me feel bad for making fun of them now… L