What is the Rabbits Foot?

Rating: 6/10 (14 September 2015)

For the third outing of the Mission Impossible franchise, JJ Abrams was bought in to bring cruise back for a new mission. Considering that he had already been creating television shows done with a cinematic budget to a cinematic quality like Lost and Alias, it made sense that he take on the reigns of the multi million dollar franchise. But whilst he is able to keep the franchise action packed, his style is unable to flourish the same way that Palma or Woo were able to in the previous films.
Some time after the second film, Hunt has decided to retire from active duty and is now training IMF agents. He also has new fiancée, forgetting Thandie Newton from Mission Impossible II, who is gone without explanation, and is now with a nurse named Julia (Michelle Monaghan). It's a situation similar to True Lies, with Cruise living a double life and his wife being entirely unaware of his life as a secret agent that Hunt has decided to leave in his past to be with her. But just like any other film about a retired agent, it's not long before Hunt has received a new self destructing message with a new mission which he chooses to accept, leading him to assemble a new team to save one of the agents he trained in the past.
And just like every Mission Impossible film, his mission inevitably goes wrong. Thus Hunt is plunged back into the life of a spy, having to take down brutal arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), save his wife to be, and track down the mysterious rabbit's foot. What exactly this rabbit foot is, we're never really told. It's a Macguffin in a similar vein to the likes of the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. It could some kind of toxin. Or it could be a doomsday device. But whatever it is, we know it's bad, and that if the villain gets his hand on it there will be trouble. It leaves it up to the viewer to decide just how high the stakes will be this time around.
As usual, Cruise is great as Hunt. He still has the American action hero charm mixed with some great stunt and physical work, with one stand out scene where he's sprinting through Shanghai at breakneck speeds. But as great as he is, Hoffman really steals the film as the psychotic arms dealer Owen Davian, who is throughout the film one of the most intimidating villains in a PG-13 movie. At the midpoint when he says to Cruise ""Do you have a wife? A girlfriend? Because if you do, I'm gonna find her. I'm gonna hurt her." We believe him, since he really seems willing to do anything to get what he wants. The only downside to his character is that he does not get enough screen time. The film even pushes him out of the way for a while, instead focusing on the overused traitor from within the organisation cliché we've already seen in both of the previous films in the franchise. You'd really think by now IMF would keep a closer check on their agents.
Abrams is able to shoot a confident action sequence, however he doesn't make the same mark on the franchise that his predecessors did. Few blockbuster films have come anywhere near the nail biting suspense that De Palma was capable of in the first Mission: Impossible and nobody's ever done it in quite the same way. And love it or loath it, no director can make an action sequence quite as over the top as Woo with his explosive 20 minute finale. But with Abrams his style is less distinct. It looks just like every other action movie, which isn't necessarily bad, but doesn't leave the same mark that the first two films had.
Beyond this there's a certain repetitiveness to the sequences. There's only so many time you can watch the same high speed chases and good guys shooting bad guys before it can become boring. And whilst the locations change, throughout the film all the action sequences end up feeling largely similar. Whilst other spy franchises at the time like Bond and Bourne were starting to experiment with darker and more realistic film-making, Mission Impossible remained stuck in the same generic action that's been see many times before. It still lives up to basic expectations, but it never tries to exceed those expectations either and is instead just a very ordinary action movie.