Mission: Impossible III was developed with David Fincher attached to direct, which would have been the second time he’s helmed the third part in an established franchise. The precedent of Alien 3 perhaps makes it fortuitous he chose to leave, and eventually it was Tom Cruise who picked his successor. Apparently he got really into the show Alias and handpicked its’ creator J.J. Abrams to direct and re-write the film. In so doing, he set the stage for one of the most dominant figures, for better or worse, in the Hollywood industry for the coming decade and a half. But Cruise’s pick was bold at the time: Abrams had never directed a movie, least of all a big action blockbuster, though he did have plenty of well-received work on television to speak for him from Felicity, Alias, and Lost -the latter the most popular show on TV at the time.
He brought over with him Alias writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to hammer out a script, and the result is something about as pertinent to its’ time as Mission: Impossible 2 six years earlier. This was a post-Bourne spy movie environment, and so it needed to be a little darker, more intense. Thus the movie opens with a captive Ethan Hunt being interrogated and implicitly tortured by a deranged international arms dealer played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, threatening his wife (Michelle Monaghan) -and even shooting her to show he’s not messing around. Its’ visceral intensity is quite a departure from the cold opens of the previous two movies and immediately alerts the audience to a very different mood and manner of stakes going forward.
I was shocked. Tonal grittiness is not something I’ve ever associated with J.J. Abrams -largely due to his movies since then being safe manageable sci-fi franchise fare. It was impressive, though also a touch disconcerting -I don’t know that Mission: Impossible as a brand can effectively lean into that Casino Royale kind of edge organically. And the movie does struggle a bit with this, especially next to Abrams’ trademark humour and light approach to plotting. He also chooses a bit of a bizarre starting premise.
After just two movies, Hunt has retired from active duty in the IMF to instead teach new agents; and has married a civilian woman who has no idea what he really does. He is recruited back into mission work for the purposes of rescuing one of his proteges (Keri Russell) kidnapped by Hoffman’s Owen Davian, and it leads to him being caught up in a major terrorist plot to secure some kind of valuable, dangerous object nicknamed the “Rabbit’s Foot”.
The Rabbit’s Foot is of course a classic J.J. Abrams “Mystery Box”, one he’s strictly opposed to revealing the actual nature of -to the movies’ detriment. All we ever know is that the villains want it, which makes their motivations weak and insubstantial. Luckily, this is made up for in the fact that Hoffman is an incredibly thrilling antagonist -easily the best the series has had thus far. Even when he is captured, he never loses his control of any situation and is quite a harrowing presence with his vivid promises of violence and willingness to immediately act on them. For this film, Abrams ups the casting all around -one of his rare gifts as a director- bringing in Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, to join Cruise and a once again returning Ving Rhames for the mission force. Laurence Fishburne is the latest head of the IMF, with Billy Crudup as his assistant and friend of Hunt’s, who arranged the mission in the first place. There’s also a technician called Benji played by Simon Pegg, who I know becomes a more prominent character in later installments. For this one he’s quite funny, and in his main scene acts as a good foil for Cruise and Rhames. Also, props to Abrams for casting Aaron Paul two years before Breaking Bad as a brother-in-law who’s essentially proto-Todd from BoJack Horseman.
Meanwhile the script, while a considerable improvement over the last movie, is working with some weak material from a story standpoint. I don’t understand much the decision to retire Hunt or code him as some past-his-prime relic (Cruise was only forty-three); and even more the choice to characterize his passions as being beyond the IMF. He seems to want out more than anything, for a quiet life with his wife away from the organization -which is an almost 180 heel-turn from his attitude in the last film. It’s clearly incorporated for plot purposes to lend greater stakes, but it comes with an almost complete rewrite of the Ethan Hunt character. And on top of it all, it creates in Julia a character who exists just to be a prop, who knows nothing about her husbands’ real life and career -not a sign of a healthy relationship; and when she does find out is inappropriately casual about it.
The movie feels incredibly 2006 in this, the dark stakes as well, and ultimately the major role that xenophobic geopolitics and specifically the War on Terror plays in the villains’ plans. It turns out that yet another treasonous IMF agent is after the Rabbit’s Foot to sell to a Middle Eastern power as an opportunity to prolong and escalate the war to America’s advantage. It’s the first real instance of this series taking an open political stance -something that Cruise famously avoids in his films -speaking to that mid-2000s fatigue with Bush-era foreign policy. The military industrial complex is the real bad guy here, which I won’t lie is a clever, even ambitious turn from the writers.
But this is an action movie, as much as a solid attempt is made in the vein of a serious espionage thriller. I liked a lot the intricate capture of Davian, which involves Hunt impersonating him and the first ever showcase of how exactly those face masks are made (and its’ pretty cool the way the application of the mask transitioning to Hoffman’s face is achieved). Davian’s escape at the Chesapeake Bay bridge might be the best action sequence, one of the few times where the villain clearly has the upper hand over Hunt. And Abrams’ direction is surprisingly focused, he makes some sharp visual choices, most notably being a late-film one-take following Hunt as he runs through Shanghai. The final confrontation between Hunt and Davian, though muted a touch by the reveal of the man behind him, is nevertheless pretty satisfying as well.
Mission: Impossible III is a certain improvement over its’ predecessor, even though in its’ own ways it doesn’t fully come together for other reasons. I at least admire its’ scope, if not its’ creative character decisions or half-thought out plot devices. Abrams pulls it off pretty decently, Hoffman is a delight and the intrigue it works in is quite interesting. But it too is dated and unsustainable. To go forward the series needed a reinvention.
I have a feeling that is where we’re headed next week, with 2011’s Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol.
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