Mission Impossible, Indeed (050506)

For those familiar with J.J. Abrams’s work on Alias, almost every scene and/or character in Tom Cruise’s latest installment to the Mission: Impossible series is reminiscent of, well, almost every scene and/or character in an episode of Alias. Don’t get me wrong, I loved every minute of M:I 3, it’s just that having gone through four seasons of Jennifer Garner’s spy series, the movie no longer held any surprises for me; I’ve already guessed who the REAL bad guy was even before halfway through the movie.
Let me see: first, the characters are somewhat clones of Alias personages. There is the overbearing department head (Lawrence Fishburne) of a clandestine government organization who ooze with enough arrogance that viewers would have no difficulty doubting his real intentions; he acts as if he is always concealing something. There’s the stuttering techie-stuck-in-a-lab guy (ala Alias’s Marshall Flenkman), hell, even agent Eric Weiss (Greg Gunberg in real life and a close friend of Abrams) makes a cameo appearance during the engagement party of Ethan and Julia. He sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb from among the revelers not only because of his corpulence, but because of his very familiar face as Vaughn and Sydney’s fellow agent and close friend.
As for the story, it offers nothing new from any of the episodes of the Jennifer Garner starrer. As I’ve mentioned earlier, Alias fans would have no difficulty guessing who really is pulling the strings. I suspect Abrams worked with a script for an Alias episode and just changed a few elements: you have a gorgeous agent (substitute Cruise for Garner) working for a covert government agency (substitute the NSA’s Impossible Missions Force for SD-6 or APO). The agent shares office space with duplicitous agents or heads working from the inside against the agency’s very mission (think Arvin Sloane and Jack Bristow, and SD-6). Add to the mix a ruthless villain obsessed with retrieving a mysterious object (replace Rambaldi’s artifacts with the “rabbit’s foot”) and the formula is complete.
Even the action scenes and the high tech gadgetry are not enough to redeem the movie from such a comparison. There's nothing in the movie that has not yet been featured in Alias. Deception through high tech facial reconfiguration? Can't fool me there. Gut wrenching and discomfort inducing brawls and torture methods? Ho-hum. Visual and aural overload of explosions, vehicle crashes and torrents of gunfire? "not with a bang but with a whimper."
For the avid (rabid?) Alias fan, M:I 3 would feel like nothing but an episode of the series. In the end, the title could very well refer to Abrams’s efforts in this movie: M:I 3 is just an amped up Alias on steroids and adrenaline overdose, not to mention sex change.

TIRVIA ALERT: Did you know that Abrams was approached to write the script for the then-untitled Superman movie? In his script, he opted to have Superman as as totally enigmatic alien with no memory of Krypton whatsoever, and Lex friggin' Luthor as a CIA agent! Thank the heavens for Bryan Singer and company, then.