popular thinking

MORE MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE NEWS

Will people go see the movie, or are they sick and tired of seeing Tom Cruise onscreen? We hit the streets yesterday. The good news? Just about everybody knows who he is. The bad news? Just about everybody thinks he’s jumped the shark, the couch and everything else in the real world.

Why not look ahead to the future? Let's greenlight M:I:IV (IV not included). Here is my pitch.

Or read it here:

The camera pans to reveal Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) enjoying his second retirement by scuba diving in the South Pacific. His leisurely underwater jaunt is interrupted by a plane crash.
An airliner plunges into the water, large chunks of debris flying past Hunt. The cockpit strikes him, knocking him out.
Cut to several years later.
Hunt reawakens, sporting that frosted hair Cruise pulled off in “Collateral,” and his child is not OK. Only Hunt didn’t know he had a child.
No, wait, that’s not the impossible part. Stop laughing.
His daughter (Dakota Fanning) is the chosen one, as predicted in a series of hieroglyphic drawings. A mysterious group on the island is made up of the descendants of the ancient cartoonists - they worship Hunt’s daughter and kidnap her, believing they can use her electromagnetic powers to steer an asteroid into Earth.
None of those fancy face masks will help Hunt this time.
To infiltrate this group, Hunt submerges himself in a bath of pink goo that reconfigures his DNA to match one of these Others.
Hunt emerges as a six-foot woman (Brooke Shields).
Now it gets complicated.
Hunt rescues his daughter but not before the asteroid’s orbit has been altered. The ensuing crash will trigger an Atlantic Ocean tsunami that will overwhelm the East Coast.
Hunt must recruit a renegade group of pilots and oil drillers for a rocket trip into space, land on the asteroid, drill a nuclear bomb into its core and rocket back to Earth before getting blown up in the explosion.
Now that’s a movie.
Paramount can send royalty checks to this writer at the Boston Herald address.

NOTE: Any similarity to “Mission: Impossible III” director J.J. Abrams’ previous works, including “Lost,” “Alias” and “Armageddon,” is entirely internalized and unconsciously copied.