Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has retired as a special agent for the IMF and is enjoying his recent engagement to the nurse Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who believes her soon-to-be husband works for transport. But when his former IMF trainee Lindsey (Keri Russell) is captured, Hunt returns to active duty and is entangled in a nasty plot that goes well beyond Lindsey. Together with his IMF team that includes his loyal colleague Luther Strickell (Ving Rhames) and new recruits Declan (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Zhen (Maggie Q), he tries to hunt down and foil the plans of the evil arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). But the operation backfires, and suddenly Hunt finds his beloved Julia at stakes.
Mission Impossible III is JJ Abrams directorial debut in cinema, and the general expectation was high in the build-up to the film’s release. This has much to do with Abrams’ two hit shows Alias and (to a much bigger extent) Lost, two television projects making a mighty good impression on his list of credentials. Abrams has several Emmys to back up his work, so Paramount’s and Cruise’s decision (as studio and producer respectively) to put the reigns in his cinematically untested hands following Joe Carnahan’s (Narc) departure from the project wasn’t really that much of a gamble. And yet, stepping into a franchise that started with a popular TV series in the late nineteen-sixties/early seventies and was transfigured into two cinematic blockbusters (Brian De Palma’s Mission Impossible in 1996 and John Woo’s Mission Impossible II in 2000) that together raked in almost $400m at the Box Office, is clearly not the same as creating your own world from scratch, freedoms Abrams enjoys with Alias and Lost.
I’m not familiar with the original television show, so I can only put Abrams’ film in the context of De Palma’s and Woo’s work and say that, despite his restrictions, Abrams radically breaks with his predecessors’ styles, which differed greatly from eachother themselves. Abrams’ film, while not at all neglecting the ludicrous action pieces that go hand in hand with anything Mission Impossible, is far more grounded and gritty than De Palma’s spionage thriller with its overly colluted plot and cascading twists and Woo’s action stomper with its no-holds-barred choreography and style over substance philosophy. So while the screen is often still filled with explosions and chases and even jumps off very high buildings, the action is thankfully never so overblown that it would numb your senses (but still breathtaking!), and the audience remains firmly rooted to the ground thanks to Abrams’ realistic but uncompromising directing approach.
I would argue that this alone elevates the quality of the third installment above the first two films, but perhaps the biggest innovation Abrams offers the franchise is the way he makes the story more personal, gifting the characters with a greater emotional resonance. The conflict Ethan Hunt feels when he is stuck deciding between a stable and fullfilling life with his fiancée Julia and a return to duty in order to save a former protegée (whom he may have shared an intimate relationship with) feels real. Luther’s repeatedly voiced pessimism towards Ethan getting married, his questions of how Ethan and Julia met and what he sees in her come across like casual discussions among two old buddies. There are other examples of how Abrams seeks to give the plot more of an everyday feel, such as the scenes in the IMF headquarters that offer a glimpse in the agency’s hierarchic structure and subsequent bullying from high rankers downwards. Or a scene in which the production of those insane face masks and accompagnying voice-imitator chips is revealed - a nice touch.
Quite interestingly, Abrams opts to leave the details surrounding the ‘rabbit-foot’, the ‘device’ the bad guy Owen Davian is trying to sell to terrorists (the event Ethan Hunt and his team are trying to prevent from happening) in the dark: the ‘rabbit-foot, also refered to as the ‘Anti-God’ (in a quite humours scene involving Simon Pegg), is central to the plot, but at no point does the film disclose what it actually is. That’s simply not important. We learn of its implications, potentially devastating events it could lead to; just enough to make us believe it needs to be confiscated by the IMF to stop something terrible from happening, but that’s all Abrams and screenwriters Alex Kurtzman (The Island, The Legend of Zorro, Transformer: The Movie) and Roberto Orci (Transformers: The Movie, The Amazon) let us in on. Not everyone in the audience will be happy about the ominousness of the danger though, and this brings me to the film’s weaker points: unfortunately, the plot shifts to the predictable side towards the end with its traitor-in-the-midst theme (why does every Mission Impossible film need to revolve around one or more IMF traitor(s)? I don’t know if this was prominent in the tv series it’s all based on, but it’s starting to feel tiresomely overused, like the one good/one bad bond girl scheme), and some of the supporting characters are shamefully left with very little exposition and not much of a character arc (I’m thinking of Rhys-Meyers’ and Maggie Q’s sidekick characters in particular, but the same also applies to Russell, Monaghan, Crudup and Hoffman, albeit to a lesser extent).
These are minor gripes, however, which did not marr my experience of one of the most satisfying action films in recent years, and coupled with the all-around excellent acting performances (Cruise is a perfect action film actor, in spite of his public stints, Oscar-winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman gives a chillingly ruthless and hardened bad guy, Laurence Fishburne is an awesome office hard-ass, and even the charming and beguiling Michelle Monaghan puts her very best into her limited screentime), Mission Impossible III is an exciting prelude to 2006’s blockbuster summer period.
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I prefer Obama to McCain. Now, McCain’s better than average for a Republican. And though his ads are intellectually offensive, he’s just bowing to his campaign masters and would calm down and be more sane once in office and not campaigning. But I have a few concerns with McCain on foreign policy. He’s not a full-fledged Neocon. That’s good. He opposed Reagan on Lebanon. Good. He was critical of Bush’s initial strategy in Iraq. That’s good. But there’s a problem. He thinks the Vietnam war was winnable and that the US shouldn’t have withdrawn. He’s also eager to spread democracy with force. This just isn’t a good set of beliefs for inheriting Iraq.