Mission: Impossible III

How funny is it that I’m writing this commentary while “Never Say Never Again” is running on TV? The story behind that film is that Sean Connery said he’d never do another Bond film, and the title is named after what his wife Micheline said when Kevin McClory convinced him otherwise in the early 1980’s to revisit the role he made famous. But Tom Cruise isn’t Sean Connery, and probably had no problem whatsoever accepting the salary offer for a third ride on the merry-go-round.

The mission, should you choose to sit and bear it, involves Ethan Hunt (Cruise), who is now retired from active duty in the IMF (Impossible Mission Force), rescuing a nearly-disavowed agent who has an explosive implanted in her head—not to mention a bad contact lens job implanted in her eye, but nevermind. The character and the general concept are based on the TV series by Bruce Geller, which featured Peter Graves as Jim Phelps, head of IMF.

Immediately, Hunt finds himself at the mercy of a sinister arms dealer, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hunt, we learn, is married. His wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), has been taken captive by Davian in exchange for information as to the location of a device he calls the Rabbit’s Foot. I call it The MacGuffin, and for good reason. This scene actually occurs later in time, and is set up exclusively to create a false sense of suspense that, when the film catches up with this flash-forward, you’ll eventually understand leads to a completely arbitrary—therefore pointless—conclusion.

Hunt has 48 hours to find the MacGuff—er, Rabbit’s Foot—before the explosive cartridge in his head fries his brain. I contend that Cruise’s brain was fried some time ago but that’s another story. Hunt’s wife knows nothing about his top secret job. She and all their friends believe he works for the Department of Transportation. Earlier in the film, we have what appears to be a Contractually-Obligated Moment of Hubris: Since this is a film that requires our star actor to be beaten up, his consolation prize is a line in the script when, after he explains he’s a traffic analyst, a couple of women gush over how they’d marry him anyway. Really, who gives a shit?

When another IMF agent, Lindsey (Keri Russell), turns up missing, Hunt is called in by the agency to lead a team to extract her from Davian’s people. Reluctantly, he accepts the mission. Sound familiar? It should. In honor of Danny Glover cycling through this paint-by-numbers plot motivator four times in the “Lethal Weapon” series, I’d like to call it the “I’m Too Old For This Shit” plot.

Returning to the helm is gadgets expert Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) whose primary purpose is to act black. Most tech experts I know act like geeks, not ethnic stereotypes. There’s also Zhen (Maggie Q), who handles infiltration; Declan (Jonathan Rhys Myers), transportation; and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), the extremely paranoid communications/tracking guru. I can accept that their roles actually mishmash a little bit (they’re not union, I’m guessing), and I can accept that some of the technologies are a bit out of this world. But my biggest problem is not the plausibility of the technology used, or the occupations portrayed, it’s the consistency of logic and the necessity of some of the audacious stunts which are pretty to look at but contribute little to the story. For example: Scaling a wall, then rolling over it with the assistance of a miniature winch, Hunt stops just inches above the ground, prone—similar to the absurd laser-evading stunt in the first film. He decelerated enough on the way down to land on his feet, which might have saved him a few seconds in what’s clearly a time-sensitive operation.

There’s an astonishing amount of questions raised by this film, none of them good. For example: When they see with their scopes the heat signature of a body being moved, how do their systems identify it as Lindsey? I can understand things like an RFID tag, but a) that renders the thermal image display entirely superfluous, and b) they never show what it is that identifies her. They spent all that money on whiz-bang computer graphic animations which waste copious amounts time and resources but—oddly—seem consistently employed in covert operations on strict timetables, and yet they don’t have time to show the audience a simple five second animation of some sort of signal confirmation?

Later, when Ethan and his team are ambushed by a missile-firing drone and men in black helicopters, I find myself wondering two things: Why are the agents carrying pistols and not MP5 submachine guns or the like, which are pretty standard issue for covert or counterterrorist operations? Also, why is the one automatic rifle in the government issue truck locked up in a place that makes it difficult to get to? The answer is bad writing.

Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup play two administrators in the IMF, and the film keeps you guessing about whose side they and everyone else is on, but you’re wasting your time. If you saw the previous films, you know that they rely entirely on high tech facial prosthetics as deus ex machina. At any given moment in the story, someone could be revealed to be entirely someone else. By the end, you feel like it might as well have been Carrot Top under the mask because no developments in the story give you an opportunity to closely follow and, possibly, decipher what the outcome may be. You can go back over a film like “The Usual Suspects” and find that your sense of much of the dialogue is turned on its side once you know who’s behind everything, and it will make you both mad and delighted to see they had to craft something so intricately to stump you. Here, it’s just a cheap shot way out of left field. The movie leaves you no sense of reward for having paid attention and everything might as well have been one large dream sequence.

Speaking of dream sequences, pay close attention to Hunt’s non-sequitur flashbacks: Don’t you ever wonder why people in movies always seem to remember things in such nicely-edited montages, in third person, complete with sweep-around camera tracking shots?

There’s no sense in discussing the movie to any finer a degree of granularity, because there is none. More attention was given to coordinating the timing of tracking shot sweep-arounds with the motion of guns being drawn or tossed in the air in slow-motion so you can marvel not at the vacuity of character or story, but be held captive in muffled boredom by the perfectly-choreographed, computer assisted geometry of a gun spinning toward a hand catching it just in time to shoot the wasted talent out of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Mission: Impossible III • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Running Time: 126 minutes • MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of frenetic violence and menace, disturbing images and some sensuality. • Distributed by Paramount Pictures