Film Review – Mission Impossible III

Having conquered the worlds of football and horticulture, Tom Selleck returns in Mission Impossible III. This time he’s attempting a jigsaw.

This film limps from start to finish, like an injured footballer whiling away his time in his garden. You’d be hard-pressed to recognise it as being from the Mission Impossible stable. Tom’s ‘mission impossible’ this time is to complete a thousand piece jigsaw. The twist that we all see coming a mile off – that gives the mission its impossibility – is that several of the pieces are missing.

It’s not a bad concept on the surface, but in practice it takes until the very end of the film before Tom starts to realise that any pieces are missing. You see it coming a mile off and it’s therefore impossible to empathise with Tom at his satisfaction in completing the sky and later the cottage. As Tom gathers the pieces for the stream section of the jigsaw you perk up a little, but the film is almost over by then and there’s only a frankly outrageous plot twist to wrap things up that’s remotely unexpected.

The makers of the Mission Impossible series have truly blotted their copybook with this episode.