Movie Review – Mission: Impossible III

Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and J. J. Abrams
Directed by J.J. Abrams

For a brief shining moment in 2002, we could have had David Fincher directing a Mission: Impossible movie. But that didn’t happen, and there would be a sequel. As cheesy & silly as Mission: Impossible 2 was, it was the second highest-grossing movie of 2000, just behind How The Grinch Stole Christmas, which meant we would be getting more of them. Joe Carnahan (Narc, The A-Team) was working in pre-production on the project, and the film was reportedly going to feature Kenneth Branagh as a Timothy McVeigh-styled villain with Carrie-Anne Moss and Scarlett Johansson starring in supporting roles. But after a conflict over the film’s tone, Carnahan left, which sent Tom Cruise to the phone to call J.J. Abrams. Due to scheduling delays, many of the film’s actors left the project, which led to recasting. Eventually, all the pieces came together, and a new Mission: Impossible came to the big screens with a whole different tone & style than the previous two.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is no longer an IMF field agent and instead trains recruits. He’s living with his fiancee, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who doesn’t know the truth about his job and believes he works for the Department of Transportation. IMF Assistant Director Musgrave (Billy Crudup) approaches Ethan about a mission that has gone wrong. One of Ethan’s proteges, Lindsay Farris (Keri Russell), was captured during an information-gathering mission on arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Ethan decides to go back into the field to rescue Lindsay and assembles a team that includes his old pal Luther (Ving Rhames). Things don’t go well, and Ethan is sent down a rabbit hole of trying to take down Davian before he can get his hands on a powerful bioweapon. Eventually, Ethan comes into Davian crosshairs, and the IMF agent finds the peace of his civilian life directly threatened.

I’m not a huge fan of J.J. Abrams, but I will admit there are some movies he’s made that work. His perspective and the material click satisfyingly, and this is one of them. Continuing the trend, this is tonally different from the previous two entries. It follows a trend of action movies at the time to be very gritty, but it also has that lens flare quality ever-present in Abrams movies, his attempt to try and mimic Spielberg to some extent. 

What makes the movie, though, is the threat of Owen Davian, one of the best villains he has ever put forward. Hoffman takes that unsettling weird, threatening energy from something like Happiness and reworks it into this global terrorist, a man who is so blunt and boiling over. He speaks in an exacting tone, assuring the people who’ve captured him that they are going to die, never breaking a sweat over it. Davian is a man unwilling to toy with the idea that he might lose and to ensure that he will kill literally anyone standing in his way. Any sense of empathy or remorse has been strip-mined from his soul. 

Ethan feels like he genuinely has something to lose in this movie, and it’s no wonder that Brad Bird and Christopher McQuarrie have clearly used it as a template going forward. The pacing is impeccable, with no minute wasted, and the set pieces are incredibly engrossing. I wouldn’t say these are sequences we’ve never seen before, and they definitely meet the definition of cheesy. However, something must be said about how a director shoots a scene. John Woo’s style of directing was so over the top in a way that clashes with Western media sensibilities that we read it as goofy. In fact, he’s a very poetic director, which is why all of his work feels so impressionistic. On the other hand, Abrams is a traditional Hollywood director, so his choices in framing a sequence support a pre-existing cultural preference for this type of material based purely on the media exposure of the audience.

The way the bridge escape sequence is shot is a perfect example. In Woo’s movies, set pieces are not plot moments or machines with gears clicking into place. Woo’s MI movie let the large-scale action moments exist as poetic spaces to bring things down with slow motion and take in the emotions and physical choreography on display. Abrams directs with a sense of urgency that Woo is just simply not interested in. Hunt has to leap across a hole blown in the bridge by a drone. He takes cover behind a car from gunfire. He chucks a rifle across the chasm and then himself. He pointlessly shoots the weapon into the air as the helicopter flies away. Hunt knows his fiancee is in danger based on Davian’s threats. 

Abrams shoots these moments from a distance, giving quick pan and zooms, a slight shakiness to the frame. He’s filming the scene like he’s shooting in a warzone. Woo shoots his films like he’s directing a ballet. Neither style is better or worse, but one is undoubtedly more familiar to a Western audience. Woo’s bridge sequence would have shown Hunt leaping across the chasm in slow motion. The music and framing would have emphasized Hunt’s internal pain over the moment’s urgency. We would have gotten quick flashes of Julia earlier in the film as stand-ins for Hunt’s thoughts in the scene. This is one of the reasons I worry about Christopher McQuarrie’s extended stay in the series. With Dead Reckoning Part 2, he will have directed half the Mission: Impossible series. As we will see with further entries, a question arises: Are these films made by the directors, or are they made primarily under the supervision of star & producer Tom Cruise?

I liked the way Davian is taken out of this movie. His death is as harsh and blunt as he is. Alive one minute, dead the next. The script sets up stakes that keep Hunt on the move, even with the villain dead. I appreciated how that moment wasn’t drawn out. Compare it to Fallout with its laborious drug-out final battle. The general audience may enjoy fights that go on for over twenty minutes, but I prefer them to be quick and to the point. In movies with so many action set pieces, it feels overindulgent to make each one a good chunk of the film rather than an entertaining bit of choreography and stunt work to cap off a scene. I will be happy as long as they keep these scenes practical instead of falling into the abyss of digital effects. This is one of few movie franchises still clinging to the spectacle of real people in action situations. 

Mission: Impossible III would earn less than the first two films yet garner more critical acclaim than either had. The box office wasn’t so low that Paramount was willing to drop the franchise, though. A fourth film was greenlit, pending the script, of course. Abrams stepped away from the director’s chair due to other commitments. He’d see success in directing Star Trek a few years later. Christopher McQuarrie would enter the franchise with the fourth film, not yet directing but an uncredited writing contribution. Very soon, the public would come to see Mission: Impossible as a cineplex institution that wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.