Mission: Impossible III Points the Franchise in the Right Direction.
Turns out making them into an action showcase was exactly what these movies needed.
Hey everyone, it’s franchise time! The newest iteration of the neverending Mission: Impossible series is upon us, because it looks like someone forgot to get their ritual sacrifice right yet again this year. We’re going to keep getting these movies until the Elder Gods are appeased, it looks like, so we might as well have fun with ’em.
By the time JJ Abrams showed up to get his hands on that sweet, sweet Mission: Impossible money, he was basically tasked with rebooting a rebooted reboot. While the first movie updated the old-school espionage series’ premise for the 90s, Woo’s second entry flung it in the most nu-metal possible direction, bogging it down with all kinds of excess and ham and ultimately opening the door for the establishment of a new standard in terms of both tone and quality. Turns out Abrams was exactly the torchbearer the franchise needed. Mission: Impossible III isn’t just an excessively canny directorial debut, it’s also a slick-as-hell action thriller that paves the way for the franchise’s current state of consistently-escalating epics.
Perhaps most immediately setting this film apart from its predecessors is its decision to treat Ethan Hunt like he’s an actual human being who has emotions and wants things other than to avoid dying/keep other people from dying. Instead of focusing solely on the action at hand, Mission: Impossible III takes the time to give Hunt a relationship (with the always fantastic Michelle Monaghan, no less!), and spends the film debating whether or not he’s the kind of person who can actually have the sort of relationship he seems to imagine himself having. The big problem with this, of course, is that the kind of “person” Ethan Hunt has no choice but to keep being is really just a simple equivocation for the job he has. He doesn’t have to deny himself the possibility of a wife and kids down the line because of some personality flaw, or a moment in his past that makes it impossible for him to do anything but throw himself off buildings and through windows in service of the greater good, or anything that might compel him to stick with the Impossible Mission Force (yeah) other than the fact that he’s just really fucking good at what he does.
And yet it all still works, because Mission: Impossible III absolutely knows it isn’t the kind of movie that needs anything more than what it has. We don’t need to know why Ethan Hunt does all the shit he does, we just need to see it presented to us in the most incredible way possible. Abrams, Kurtzman, and Orci knew that this needed to be a movie wherein the action was first priority, but smartly realized that just a little bit of an emotional throughline would give the audience something to latch onto, and enable this film to widen the scope ever so slightly on the franchise — and it does exactly that, well enough to make this a clear series turning point, even though it’s only the third movie in.
Say what you will about JJ Abrams’ abilities as a director, there are two things he almost inescapably nails just about every time he steps up to the plate: casting and production design. And both are on display in full force, here. (As a matter of fact, so are his directing skills — this movie is just delightfully light on its feet, moving with a swooping, long-take kinesis that has by now become his visual trademark.) Monaghan is perfect as always, but the real coup in this movie, which keeps its cast pretty small, is Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian. Maybe the franchise’s most excellently-named and even-more-excellently cast villain, Davian is basically a black market badass who’s after a doomsday MacGuffin simply known as the Rabbit’s Foot. This is set off once a failed rescue mission for one of Hunt’s previous recruits (Keri Russell!!) winds up revealing a mole working with Davian from within the IMF. Amidst all the intrigue is the question of whether or not Hunt can ever actually settle down, having been yanked back into the field after retiring into a training position at the agency.
As is the case with most of these movies, the plot is mostly an excuse to string together a series of fantastic setpieces, and that’s exactly what happens here. A thrilling helicopter chase in the opening act bleeds into a tense multilayered heist-style mission (this franchise’s true trademark, if you ask me) bleeds into an absolutely insane bridge-set attack sequence, and so on and so forth. The plot is just sturdy enough to prop up all the action, and Abrams’ polished visual style lends the entire affair an air of realism that was so sorely lacking from Woo’s sequel. Behind the camera, Abrams has an interesting ability to imbue fantastic scenarios and sequences with his own sort of grounded realism, attention to practical detail and gunmetal-slick production design working in harmony to give everything a sort of futuristic, yet highly-functional sheen that makes this particular film cook like nobody’s fucking business.
Mission: Impossible III might not be the best film in the franchise, but it gets a heaping helping of credit for stepping in and establishing its new direction. Heists. Masks. Tom Cruise throwing himself off shit. Running. So much running. Great gunplay. Some of the things that make this movie what it is are more or less new to the franchise, others were in play before but have been polished to a new degree by the Bad Robot team. In either case, the alchemy is just right, and the third Mission: Impossible movie is an endlessly watchable thriller, whose formula arguably spawned our very best modern action franchise.
NB: This originally appeared on devisemag.com on July 24, 2018.
