Cruise Month - Mini Review: Mission: Impossible: III

Once again, it’s Cruise Month

And we have the third Mission: Impossible Movie. The movie with the most production problems of the 4. David Flincher was originally slated to direct the movie, but he ultimately abandoned the project in favour of another film, later citing some creative differences. Joe Carnahan was the second director they appointed, and he worked on the film for 15 months before quitting the film also citing creative differences. The director that ended up on the film was J J Abrams, in his first role as a film director. While he hasn’t directed any of the movies since, he has stayed on as a producer alongside Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner. The film was delayed a year in order to allow Abrams to finish his TV work with Lost and Alias.

Of course when the director quits 15 months into production, a lot of work and money had already gone into the project, with actors such as Scarlett Johansen to star in prominent roles and a plot more in line with the 4^th movie. However, owing to the delays the budget had to be re-evaluated (with Cruise taking a pay cut for his role) and the film recast for a different script. The film made less than $400million on a $150million budget, the lowest of the series.

This isn’t owing to the quality of the film, there are two possible reasons behind this. 1) People have been disillusioned by the quality of the previous 2 films. And 2) the “Trapped in the closet” controversy:  An episode of South Park with that title was pulled from Comedy Central by Viacom because Cruise reportedly threatened to drop out of marketing Mission Impossible III if the episode were repeated. (The episode was making fun of scientology and the title was an in-joke about Cruise's sexuality) these claims were denied by Cruise but some encouraged a boycott of the movie as Cruise had purportedly questioned a civil liberty.

But I’m not here to look too deeply into the politics, I’m here to examine how the film stands on its own merits.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is brought back into the IMF in order to rescue a captive agent, Lindsay Ferris (Keri Russell) who had been captured by weapons dealer Owan Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who she was tasked with investigating covertly. The mission ends disastrously and Lindsay dies, so Hunt and his new team:  Luther (reprised by Ving Rhames), Zhen Lei (Maggie Q) and Declan Gourmley (Johnathan Rhys Meyers) vow to hunt down Davian wherever he is in the world.

They succeed but things get personal when Hunt’s wife, Julia Madede (played by Michelle Monaghan) is forced into the play forcing Hunt to find a steal the mysterious ‘Rabbit’s foot’

The area this film does the best in, where the films falter is pacing. It’s a much better paced films with action scenes shorter but more frequent and a plot that’s actually pretty good. J J Abrams certainly established a few of his directing styles in this film, what is the obsession with lens flares?!

As the critics seemed to agree, this is the best of the first 3 Mission: Impossible movies (I'll get to the fourth one later). Managing to balance a decent attempt at a story, solid action, and more than a few character moments for Ethan (I’ll come back to this)

But this is not without its problems. The first off is the introduction of Cruise’s wife. She is not a prominent character in the film, and comes off somewhat as on object to be rescued. She sort-of proves herself useful at the end but only under Cruise’s guidance.

Then comes the team itself: whilst Hunt has his character fleshed out once again, we get very little development for any other member of his team. And Luther is the only one who showed any talents outside of traditional spywork, which Ethan himself is a master at. This would be fine, if they had interesting personalities but I’m sad to report that they don’t.

The back half of the movie has Ethan a fugitive from the IMF and him pulling off a heist job, if you think that’s treading familiar ground, I agree with you, having said that, they keep it short (not showing us too much of the goings on from the inside) so the pacing doesn’t suffer from it.

In fact the most interesting character in this movie outside of Ethan himself is the IMF technician Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) who’s antics prove quite amusing. The Rabbit’s Foot that is sought during the movie is definitely a mcguffin. We know very little about it and we don’t find out anything during the movie. As such it’s rather to assess what threat the villain poses with this plan. We know the Rabbit’s Foot is heavily guarded, which gave us an indication but little else

Having said that, I really enjoyed Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Owen Davian, it was a highlight of the movie as he brought just the right degree of menace and full blown psychopath.

This one is overall a decent, but not flawless movie

Rating 65/100

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Images used in this review are from Mission: Impossible: III and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.