This is Abrams' first film, after a few successful years in TV (he's the creator of Alias and Lost), and it is reportedly the most expensive first film any director has ever made.
TV's Mission: Impossible was a large influence on Alias -- at least one episode was a direct homage to the earlier show -- so it's a fine fit for Abrams, who gets to indulge a lot of his favorite narrative devices. There's the in medias res beginning with the hero in peril that jumps back to the start of the story; there's the fascination with masks and doubling; there's a nerdy, stammering computer geek; and there's the odd notion that the way for a female spy to go undercover is to wear a stunning gown that makes her the most attention-grabbing thing in the room.
Tom Cruise has always been an actor who works up to the level of his best co-stars; he'll never be the worst thing in a movie, but if you don't surround him with talent, he's not going to be very impressive himself. So the presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain and Michelle Monaghan as the love interest, which might seem like overkill, pushes Cruise to a performance of surprising emotional intensity; the dialogue scenes among those three characters are just as tense and exciting as the action scenes. (And the supporting characters aren't exactly talentless slouches themselves; Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers are all on hand.)
And those action scenes are terrific. A helicopter chase through a field of wind turbines, a break-in and kidnapping from the Vatican, a mad dash along the banks of a Shanghai river -- they're all top-notch thrills, and Cruise does this type of material better than anyone.
There was one thing that distracted me; there are lots of scenes -- the opening scene with Hoffman, in particular -- in which Cruise bears a striking facial resemblance to Adam Sandler. I'd never noticed that before, but it would be interesting to see the two cast as brothers.
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