No movie is as full of perfect Zen emptiness

...in any form, seen in any direction, in any language, no movie is as full of perfect Zen emptiness as "M:i:III." It's the hole in the doughnut, the shoe that never drops, the sound of one hand clapping, the moon in reflection in the cold stream. It's there/not there at once. It's so... wonderful.

Shorn of its connection to the possibility of coherence, the movie was a giddy wonderland ride of primal joys and goober-instincts. It was so profoundly nothing, I fell in hopeless love with its gaudy surface, its glittery superficiality, its utter alienation from anything true about the world.

Cruise: Earnest, humorless, appearing to believe that which is before him (as nobody else could), he slides through the preposterous screenplay (some hugger-mugger about an arms dealer who's obtained the "Mousetrap," a WMD so terrifying the scriptwriters didn't even know what it was) with cosmetic cuts and bruises, attracting the love of all men and all women. Mentor, son, hero and jock, he's every man's ideal self and he's so... boring... he's wonderful. He's the perfect "O" in the center of all the shenanigans. You don't have to pay him a whisper of attention. His job was to say yes, attract the financing and let the movie go on about him.

- Stephen Hunter reviews Mission: Impossible III, Washington Post, 27 August 2006

[Courtesy of Louwrens. As of mid-July the film had grossed US$133m in America]