After two commercially successful Mission: Impossible movies, a third was surprisingly slow to come together. Various directors, and even most of a main cast, were attached and then dropped out. Producer and star Tom Cruise had to take a pay cut, but got a director he was happy with: J.J. Abrams, then showrunner on Lost.
The film was pushed back to accommodate Abrams’ schedule, finally released in 2006, six years after Mission: Impossible 2. Mission: Impossible III (note changed numbering scheme) was reasonably well-received by critics, and made a moderate amount of money. Say this as well: it’s Abrams’ best film to date based on a 1960s TV show, and it’s not particularly close.
The story has Ethan Hunt (Cruise) about to be married to Julia, a nurse (Michelle Monaghan) who doesn’t know he’s a spy. Then he has to enter the field, to recover an agent he trained who was part of an operation to take down a sinister arms dealer named Davian (Philip Seymur Hoffman). Things go wrong. Hunt, bent on revenge, gathers a team for an off-the-book mission and captures Davian after a complicated operation at the Vatican.
But dark forces are in motion. Armed men free Davian in transport, and capture Julia. Davian gives Hunt a mission in exchange for Julia: find a mysterious item named the “Rabbit’s Foot.” Hunt’s promptly arrested for his actions in the Vatican; he has to escape, find the Rabbit’s Foot, save Julia, and bring Davian to justice.
It’s a reasonable plot structure for an action movie. There are effective set-pieces, some sneaking around, some blow-ups, and bits of business for an engaging supporting cast (Hunt’s teammates, played by Maggie Q, Johnathan Rhys Myers, and the estimable Ving Rhames; along with Simon Pegg as a support techie). But the movie doesn’t add up.
Consider the opening, a flash-forward in which a captive Hunt’s interrogated, ending with (it appears) Julia shot by Davian; then there’s the opening credit sequence; then a blackout, and a door opens, and we’re inside a refrigerator, and Julia has opened the door and is looking inside. Aha, you think, right after killing the lead’s love interest we get what must be a deliberate reference to the “women in refrigerators” trope of killing male lead characters’ love interest for cheap motivation.
But there’s no follow-up. It’s a wink from the filmmakers: we know what we did, trust us. In that sense, it’s a broad hint that there’s more to the flash-forward than meets the eye, but you have to expect that going in.
Later set-pieces are tightly-machined, mostly small-scale, with few sweeping vistas. But often too elaborate. The scene at the Vatican gives a showcase of the team’s technology and competencies, but you wonder if the plan needed to be as elaborate as it was just to kidnap one guy.
The problem for this movie is that it invites that kind of question. It aims at being a little grittier than the last one, a little more down-to-earth. That doesn’t fit well with the superhuman competence you come to see in a Mission: Impossible film.
Worse, the movie tries to develop Hunt and Julia’s relationship. Nothing about it works. There’s no chemistry between the actors, Julia never comes to life as a character, and you wonder how you can take Hunt seriously as a good guy when he’s lied to his fiancée ever since he met her. The emotional and thematic climax of the movie is that in the end Hunt comes clean to her, but by then the bad guy’s kidnapped her and she’s had to shoot her way out; so really not much choice there.
Hunt remains a blank. You could plausibly argue that Cruise plays a different character in all three movies to this point. Granted, Hunt’s aged 10 years over these films, but there’s not much consistency to him. There is a consistency in the movies’ villains, though. In all three films, some member of the Impossible Missions Force turns out to be a baddie. At least in this case we also get Davian. His part is underwritten, and shouldn’t amount to very much; but he’s played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Hoffman is far too talented for this movie. He takes a trite, generic bad guy and makes him live. His casual yet terrifying aside to Hunt during the final fight—“I tell you she called your name?”—becomes one of the most chilling moments of the series, entirely due to his delivery.
But this isn’t an actor’s film. It’s a special-effects action movie, and Abrams is at least able to give his own kind of spin to the action beats. There are lens flares and lots of handheld work and fast editing; not the thematic fascinations that De Palma and John Woo managed to get into their Mission: Impossible movies, but at least a recognizable style. At best, it anchors the scope of Woo’s action to the grounded violence of De Palma. At worst, it gives a superficial sense of grit to scenes with too many guns and too many explosions.
You can see hints of the Jason Bourne movies in this one, as Abrams puts his own spin on the material. The movie has a certain mid-2000s charm as a result, a muddled paranoia that keeps it from becoming the overwrought summer tentpole movie. And it’s hard to say that the movie’s less than competent. It moves decently, the actors all do reasonable jobs, it’s not aggressively dumb. But it’s also not very smart, lacks thematic ideas, and never takes flight.