Mission: Impossible 3 review

2006.05.25 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

Ethan Hunt is on the lam again in Mission: Impossible 3. I've been holding off on writing this review because I'm pretty sure there's no way I can do it without revealing the ending—the horrible, horrible ending. It's not that the ending is horrible—altho it is—because much of the rest of the movie is horrible too. Rather, it's that the ending is so stupendously familiar, which, of course, is part of what makes it horrible, but only part.

Tom Cruise stars as the heroic secret agent, now in semi-retirement and handling only training while preparing for a wedding to a clueless fiancee. The relationship between them is the strong point of the film, I'd say (maybe excepting Hoffman's performance), but we've seen this sort of thing before. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Spy Kids, True Lies, and others have explored the secret-even-from-the-family idea. But it works just fine here too. He is, of course, recruited for the proverbial "one last job" we've also seen so many times, this time to rescue one of the agents he trained.

The film is directed by JJ Abrams, creator of Lost and Alias. He does a great job pulling performances out of his actors (not that you'd have to try too hard with Hoffman, Fishburne, and Crudup) and makes sure the action sequences are exciting. It was written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who gave the world the gifts of The Island and The Legend of Zorro (beware: those links go to my pained reviews of those movies; not their IMBD entries).

Here is where Cruise gets some support from Ving Rhames, Maggie Q, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, a really terrific group I'll ask for by name (or initial) when I'm called on to accomplish some impossible mission. That mission goes badly, unfortunately, partly because it is the messiest covert operation in history. Honest to God, the United States Army regularly performs missions more elegantly.

Naturally, the various bosses get upset, including Billy Crudup as Cruise's direct supervisor and Lawrence Fishburne as the impossible-to-please head of Impossible Mission Force. Fishburne chews up the scenery at least as well as the many other men to play Angry Black Police Captain, but his anger is completely nonsensical. He seems to think that anyone who gets captured deserved to get captured because they are incompetent, and anyone who trained them is by definition also incompetent. He seems not to realize that his department's missions are, be general consensus, impossible in the first place and that would tend to lead to at least some failures.

It doesn't matter much that there's really no sensible reason for the IMF rescue mission to go wrong. The actions of the villain don't make much sense, but no one seems to notice. I mean seriously: a remote-control, time-release nasal bomb? Who can plan for that? It's impossible! But this is no ordinary villain. Philip Seymour Hoffman is the gratuitously mean Owen Davian, an arms dealer or something who becomes IMF's next target. He wants something referred to only, in rather Mametian fashion, as "the rabbit's foot."

Without telling the bosses, Cruise and Co. pull off a fabulously improbable sting that nets both Davian and some documents revealing the location of the rabbit's foot. But Davian makes some crazy threats he can't possibly follow thru on... and then it all goes pear-shaped and Davian proceeds to follow thru on his threats. How he does it is a mystery... unless you've seen Mission: Impossible 1. Why he does it is just stupid.

Altogether, Mission: Impossible 3 was a painful, familiar, but never boring and genuinely well-acted roller coaster ride that I don't look forward to ever seeing again on DVD or in sequel form. Then again, I didn't learn my lesson after Mission: Impossible 2.

Here is where I have to give away the ending.

Part 2: Mission: Impossible 3 ending analysis

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