A lot happens in the third Mission: Impossible. Little bombs are launched up folk's noses and into their brains. A gorgeous tangerine Lambor-ghini Diablo is cruelly blown to smith-ereens. And tremendous time and effort are devoted to chasing down the contents of what might be the most dangerous thermos in the history of movies.
Only theoretically, though, is this exciting. Mostly, it all feels like a lateral move that keeps alive a franchise without breaking new ground. The release of Mission: Impossible 3 marks the arrival of summer blockbusting. But the movie, directed and co-written by J.J. Abrams, the busybody creator of ABC's Alias and Lost, doesn't rise to the seasonal occasion so much as settle into it. In any Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise has to plummet from some outrageous height only to dangle 15cm above the ground, and so he does.
Brian De Palma directed the first installment, in 1996, with a jolly indifference to a navigable plot. He'd made a subversive blockbuster that he knew was ridiculous. He was winking at us, yet it was exciting: helicopters flying through train tunnels. Four years later, John Woo handled the sequel, and he seemed to think it'd be fun to sleepwalk through the whole thing. It wasn't.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF UIP
Abrams's contribution is superior to Woo's in that he appears to be wide awake. But a decade after the first movie, that kind of ludicrousness just seems commonplace now -- thanks in large part to Abrams and his TV shows, where absurd confrontations are treated with a kind of reverence. To a significant extent, Alias is a tribute to the original Mission: Impossible television series. So in a sense, the pop cosmos would seem to demand that he direct one of these movies, as much as his agents would.
Abrams is almost too comfortable in this big-screen world of espionage. In Mission: Impossible: 3, a duel between helicopters set amid the propellers of a wind farm feels like business as usual. Isn't this the way action sequences have always been? The task seems to have inspired him merely to be extremely competent. He doesn't have many surprises for us.
The story seems especially ancient. In the six years since Mission: Impossible 2, Cruise's special agent Ethan Hunt has retired from fieldwork and is now just an instructor. He's engaged now, to a nice, tallish, dark-haired woman (Michelle Monaghan) who knows nothing about his double life but dotes on him anyway. (Boy, that seems familiar.) Domestic life suits him. But when an agent Ethan trained gets into trouble, he's pulled back in. Sigh.
Needless to say, the missing agent is the jumping-off point for a plot that leads straight to a porcine, global arms dealer named Owen Davian, who's played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Having spent most of last year riding high as the fragile, lisping Truman Capote, Hoffman seems content to be playing a virile basso profundo and out-and-out sadist who gets to talk Malkovich to Tom Cruise. "I'm gonna find her and I'm gonna hurt her," he growls, describing his plans for Ethan's ladylove. Hoffman is a backhanded delight. He's the last person you'd expect to be here. So watching him rough himself up, as he does in the best sequence in the whole movie, is clever and jokey: Hoffman on Hoffman, literally.
The rest of the cast is fun, too. It's a splendid and strange mix of actors. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the reptilian climber from Woody Allen's Match Point; Keri Russell (who was the star of Felicity, Abrams's first TV show); and the American-born Asian movie star Maggie Q join the franchise's other mainstay, Ving Rhames, as Ethan's cohorts. Monaghan, the little-red-Corvette miner in North Country, seems like a nice young lady, even with duct tape over her mouth. Meanwhile, the thespians Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup work in the agency's front offices, where corruption lurks.
But they toil in the name of blandness. Could I have Summer Movie Fatigue one film in? A hail of bullets and a megastar falling out of the sky just seem part of the forecast. The filmmakers vowed this film would turn the spy-movie on its ear. But I didn't see a musical number anywhere.
If the pulse never quite races, the mind does boggle, especially during a demolition sequence on a suspended highway, complete with missiles, helicopters, and fighter jets. But did Abrams mean for it to evoke battles in Fallujah? Another time, Cruise writes out a long series of numbers on a window: Are those the projected box-office grosses?
Abrams does pledge familiar, seemingly contractual allegiance to Cruise's fitness. His T-shirts have short-short sleeves that reveal quivering veins in his biceps. His indestructible jeans relentlessly flatter his fanny. And the world's streets and pavements clear so he can sprint like a juiced-up cheetah. As usual, Cruise gives it his all. I love this man. But, sadly, not once during this movie was I moved to attack a sofa in his name.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
Despite the intense sunshine, we were hardly breaking a sweat as we cruised along the flat, dedicated bike lane, well protected from the heat by a canopy of trees. The electric assist on the bikes likely made a difference, too. Far removed from the bustle and noise of the Taichung traffic, we admired the serene rural scenery, making our way over rivers, alongside rice paddies and through pear orchards. Our route for the day covered two bike paths that connect in Fengyuan District (豐原) and are best done together. The Hou-Feng Bike Path (后豐鐵馬道) runs southward from Houli District (后里) while the
President William Lai’s (賴清德) March 13 national security speech marked a turning point. He signaled that the government was finally getting serious about a whole-of-society approach to defending the nation. The presidential office summarized his speech succinctly: “President Lai introduced 17 major strategies to respond to five major national security and united front threats Taiwan now faces: China’s threat to national sovereignty, its threats from infiltration and espionage activities targeting Taiwan’s military, its threats aimed at obscuring the national identity of the people of Taiwan, its threats from united front infiltration into Taiwanese society through cross-strait exchanges, and its threats from
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at