Mission: Rewatchable - 'Mission: Impossible III'
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to revisit all previous Mission: Impossible movies in advance of July 12's Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. Next up in the queue: 2006's Mission: Impossible III. This retrospective will self-destruct in 3... 2... 1...
Mission: Impossible III is a J.J. Abrams joint - in fact, it was his feature directing debut (he co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborators Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci). And it has all the strengths and weaknesses of Abrams' other work: The cast has charisma to burn, the pace moves at a clip, the action scenes are generally fun if not particularly memorable, the entire story is riffing on stuff other people have done better, there's an undercooked love story for which Michael Giacchino's score does most of the heavy lifting, there's a tantalizing mystery for which Abrams has no intent of providing an answer, Felicity from Felicity and Greg Grunberg both show up, and a portion of it was made to appeal to the Chinese market. Fun!
The set-up this time is that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is no longer an active IMF field agent, but, rather, and instructor who trains other IMF field agents. He's met a nice doctah, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), and they're engaged, and she thinks he studies traffic patterns for the Department of Transportation. But then Ethan's latest celebrity boss, Billy Crudup, informs him that one of his students, Felicity from Felicity, has been captured while snooping on an international arms dealer, Owen Davian (the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman). Even though these movies always the looming threat of being disavowed, Billy Crudup explains that Felicity has to be rescued for reasons I can't remember even though I literally just finished re-watching this movie moments before I started typing this. And because Ethan told Felicity she was ready to be in the field and he feels guilty that she got captured, he agrees to go rescue her with help from the newest iteration of team, including Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as inhumanly good-looking spies with no real character traits, and returning franchise MVP Ving Rhames as the lovably grumpy super-hacker and excuse to have exposition said aloud, Luther.
Somewhat interestingly, the person from whom J.J. Abrams is stealing is not Steven Spielberg (Super 8) or George Lucas (The Force Awakens, The Rise of Skywalker) or also George Lucas and kinda Tony Scott (Star Trek) with a dash of Christopher Nolan (Star Trek Into Darkness) - it's J.J. Abrams. When Abrams' Alias debuted on ABC in 2001, the idea of a spy living a double life that includes friends and family who have no idea what they really do wasn't new by any means... but it was new within the framework of a James Bond-esque action movie, where the spy part of being a spy is mostly beside the point (as opposed to John le Carré stories or Graham Greene stories or Frederick Forsyth stories or really just any spy story in which the protagonist doesn't just walk around using announcing their real name and blowing things up on a regular basis and generally not doing much to maintain a low profile). That's what made Alias seem so unique for a hot second. On that show, the premise was that the spy (Jennifer Gardner) was also a college student, but the general idea is the same. The Alias pilot, which Abrams wrote and directed, even begins in the middle of a mission gone awry before flashing back to happier times... which is exactly how Mission: Impossible III begins. I gave up on Alias after awhile, but if memory serves, it also involved a seemingly-magical MacGuffin that ended up going nowhere.
ANYWAY, Ethan et. al. go to rescue Felicity, and while they do manage to remove her from Davian's clutches, they do not manage to stop a small explosive device from detonating in her brain. Unfortunately, this detonation is not as cool as the exploding heads in David Cronenberg's Scanners. Still, her death is actually pretty gnarly, with her left eye abruptly going all wonky after the detonation, like she's Pennywise from It. I understand that you probably can't have a head explode in a PG-13 movie, so I guess this is a fair compromise.
https://youtu.be/PJjz0dUp3ewhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBkUPgL_prY&t=248s
So now of course Ethan is very angry, and he enacts a plan to prevent Davian from getting something called The Rabbit's Foot, a weapon Simon Pegg's character intriguingly theorizes to be "The Anti-God." Mission: Impossible III is an Abrams story, though, so we never actually find out what the hell The Rabbit's Foot is or what it does. In fact, it becomes a gag in the last scene of the movie: Ethan can either retire and live happily ever after with Julia, or he can learn what The Rabbit's Foot is from his new celebrity boss' new celebrity boss, Laurence Fishburne (he chooses his new wife, natch). I think would be less annoying if a) it wasn't what Abrams does EVERY SINGLE TIME, and b) Abrams didn't build it up so much. The MacGuffin is, of course, ultimately unimportant - so could have just said it was a nuke and the audience would be like, "A nuke, scary, got it." But instead he created this super-MacGuffin, everyone wants to know the details, not getting them feels dissatisfying.
Before that big letdown, though, a bunch of other shit happens. Second-most notably, there's a pretty good heist sequence that involves breaking into the Vatican to kidnap Davian. If nothing else, it gives Cruise and Meyers an excuse to do a scene that isn't too far off from this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4fw3umsnwY&t=6shttps://youtu.be/NkY0L9LUyPg
Most-most notably, there's another heist sequence, except we never actually get to see it. It involves Ethan leaping from one Shanghai high-rise to another, which we do see, but then he goes into the building and we don't see anything that happens again until he comes back out. Instead we get a lame conversation between Maggie Q and Meyers in which I guess we're meant to believe they like each other or something. It's weird and dumb and makes me wonder if they ran out of money or what the heck happened here.
There's also a nonsensical plot twist. See, Ethan comes to believe that Laurence Fishburne is working with Davian, and is therefore responsible for Felicity's murder. But it turns out that Billy Crudup is the one working with Davian. But Billy Crudup is the one who got Ethan involved in the first place. When he reveals he's working with the bad guy, he's trying to get Ethan to tell him what's on a secret comminqué Felicity sent Ethan before she was killed, 'cause he's afraid the message may have been "Don't trust Billy Crudup." But he also claims he didn't want Felicity to die and that he thought he Ethan would be able to save her. So I guess my big question is: Why did Billy Crudup involve Ethan in the first place? If Ethan saved Felicity and she knew Billy Crudup was up to no good, that would be bad for Billy Crudup. If Billy Crudup knew about the secret message Felicity sent Ethan, then he just needed to intercept that message, which would not involve saving Felicity. I think the only reason Billy Crudup calls Ethan in the first place is because he read the script and he knows the movie needs to happen.
On the plus side, in addition to the traditional Mission: Impossible moment of Tom Cruise hanging horizontally by a bungee cord, this movie has what is I believe the franchise's first of many long full-body shots of Cruise running like a maniac.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxeAqbgUv1o&t=46s
I also think Abrams does a nice job with a few of set-ups, precisely because they don't feel like set-ups. It's not like the Wayne's World joke where the protagonist gets a bunch of extraneous information that's clearly going to be important later. For example, there's a scene early on where Ethan uses his lip reading skills to "listen in" on a conversation amongst Julia and her friends - and when he suddenly adds to that conversation, they're all like, "How did he hear us?" And it's a funny little moment that reminds the audience that Ethan is a spy and that no one in his life has any idea. It doesn't necessarily make you think that lip reading is gonna end up being important later, but it is. Ditto the whole small-bomb-in-a-character's-skull thing. It just seems like a neat way to murder Felicity - but then when they put one of those bombs in Ethan's head, you're like, "Oh, shit! THIS BAD NEWS, BRUH!!!" It works pretty well I think.
And like I said, the cast is also pretty good. Laurence Fishburne gets a funny scene where he chews out Ethan and Billy Crudup for bungling shit so badly (who ever thought there'd be a Ralph Ellison reference in a friggin' Mission: Impossible movie?), it's always nice to see Eddie Marsan (even though, playing one of Davian's goons, he barely has any actual dialogue), and a pre-Breaking Bad Aaron Paul shows up briefly as Julia's ne'er-do-well brother.
But the incontestable highlight of the film is Hoffman. No big shock, right? But seriously, the man turned taking a paycheck into an art form. There isn't a ton to Davian; for an actor as good as Hoffman to play a part so thinly written must have been pretty boring. So Hoffman makes Davian bored. He raises his voice a few times, and he's certainly capable of snark (after Maggie Q stains his shirt: "That's okay, I always spill wine on my custom-made white shirt."). But most of the time, he seems like he can't be bothered to give a shit - and that makes him feel really threatening. He has the casual confidence of an invulnerable, omnipotent sociopath, and IMF trying to get in his way is about as bothersome as a waiter getting his order wrong.
Take, for example, the scene in which Ethan totally loses his shit while interrogating Davian and hangs the villain out of an airplane. Davian seems borderline disinterested; he asks for Ethan's name the way you'd ask for the name of a rude server at a restaurant. And even if he's scared when he's being hung out of the plane, he remains relatively calm, and never comes close to giving up the intel Ethan desires - so we understand this character has some serious willpower. Consequently, when he casually reveals that he has figured out a clue to Ethan's identity at the end of the scene, it's chilling.
Mission: Impossible 3 is by no means a great movie, and it's still not as good as Brian De Palma's original Mission: Impossible. But it's a helluva lot better than John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2... so that's something, right?