Amy and I made it back into a movie theatre again, for the first time in quite a while. It was an opportunity to use our Five Buck Club membership. Naturally, we spent $18 in food stuffs to go with the minor discount. (Oh, curse you, consumerism!). On the docket was Mission: Impossible III, the first check on the summer of movies ("The Summer of Half-Sawbuck Movies").
I’ll admit … Tom Cruise’s crazy frenzy, coupled with Amy obsessing over it all the time, had my expectations pretty low. The IDS panned it, and the original sequel wasn’t as good as the original (though not terrible). I was worried I would go, and not only would the movie be bad but Cruise would turn out to be a bad actor and not the guy I raved over for Jerry Maguire and other efforts.
Not to worry. I liked the action, which was like seeing several small TV plots sequentially rolled into one movie, and other than a rather stilted line or two (”Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,” as a dramatic code phrase; and some Scientology-inspired exchange about praying for a cat to return), it was quality stuff. Not Oscar-worthy stuff, but sights were significantly lower than that.