Alias: The Movie

I went to see Alias: the Movie last night. True, it's masquerading under the title of "Mission: Impossible: 3: the quickening: a Tek Jansen adventure", but with J.J. Abrams directing and the Alias cast scripting, it's actually a more or less direct transfer of the creaking TV show to the big screen. Firstly, it's a fairly typical story: a secret black-ops agency has to go rogue in order to save the life of one of their own. There's some mysterious, secret weapon (I expect the subplot linking in to a Da Vinci-esque mysterious prophetic 14th Century scientist got cut for length) that mostly functions as a macguffin and isn't really important anyway.

But the biggest give away is that all the characters are the same as in Alias. There's the close team of super spies able to adopt accents and languages as needed and take place in pitched firefights without getting their clothes rumpled. Various senior agency members who are double- or triple- crossing everyone else for their own ends. The wholly evil bad guy who somehow manages to escape capture about twice a week. Tom Cruise gives a surprisingly effective performance as Jennifer Garner. But the easiest spot is Simon "Spaced" Pegg who gives a spot on re-creation of Marshall Flinkman (note that this is the true purpose of Wikipedia: providing unnecessary detail on fictional TV and computer game characters). Pegg is woefully underused in the movie, of course, and rather bizarrely, appears to be made up to resemble Dave Gorman. Still, not having been aware that he was in the film, it made for a bit of a "huh?" moment when his name flashed up in giant letters in the start after Tom Cruise and Laurence Fishburne.