A Fun Return to Form for the Series Following the Disappointing M:I:II

Rating: 7/10 (23 January 2016)

Needing to flush the sour taste of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II from my mind, I've followed it with a viewing of the 2006 installment, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III. The third film in the ongoing franchise is the on I'm least familiar with. I didn't get around to seeing it in theaters and I watched once when it was released on DVD before my copy was lost. At the time, I remembered this one blowing my mind and establishing itself as my favorite of the series. Does it hold up now? Mostly, yeah. I don't rank it as my favorite of the original three films anymore (that honor returns to the original 1996 film) but it's still significantly better and more entertaining than the second film. From J.J. Abrams in his feature-film directing debut, the movie begins as IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has settled down in life. He is no longer a field agent, opting to train new agents so he can build a stable life with his fiancée Julia (Michelle Monaghan). When Hunt learns a former protégé (Keri Russell) has gone missing on an operation where she was assigned to follow notorious arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Hunt rejoins his team to bring her home. But it won't be that easyDavian is a mad-man and he's not afraid to murder in cold-blood to discourage others from interfering in his business. Hunt is about to learn the dangers of crossing one of the most powerful, well-connected international criminals when you've got something to lose.
M:I:III improves over its immediate predecessor by scaling down the action and making it serve the plot, instead of vice versa. The action isn't the centerpiece; the characters are. Specifically, Hunt. This is a personal mission for him. He personally trained Lindsey Farris, the agent captured in the beginning, and feels responsible for bringing her home safe. Later in the film, Davian discovers that Hunt has a pressure point in the form of his new wife and uses it to control the situation. These, my friends, are stakes and what M:I:II was missing to make me care about Hunt and Nyah. We get to spend some time with Hunt and Julia in the first act of the film and see them interact. We get a sense of their relationship and how happy they make each other. Hunt is so in love that he's willing to quit his globe-trotting life of spy adventures for the woman. See? Character development. Even Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), member of Hunt's team since the first film, gets it better this time around and isn't limited to whining about his Gucci shoes. The villain of the piece, as played by Hoffman, is a terrifying man without having to do much. From the moment the movie opens, we see the lengths the man will go to get what he wants. He never loses his cool. He's calm, collected, and soft-spoken and it works for him because we've seen how dangerous he is. Hoffman's a pro and makes for an excellent baddie.
I'd stated before that the action is "scaled down" in this one and that's because it goes for quality over quantity. There are some pretty sweet action sequences in M:I:III. There's an awesome helicopter chase through a wind farm and the big action piece in the middle of the film where the villain employs a military-grade drone to escape a convoy on a bridge. Honestly, my favorite sequence in the film isn't one of the grand battles but the infiltration of the Vatican when the IMF team realizes they have a chance at acquiring Davian. It's not bombastic; it's more of the cooler spy stuff I loved about the first film. I always find I love these movies more when their treated as a spy film with action elements, rather than an action film with spy elements. I love that we get to see more in M:I:III about how the IMF works behind the scenes. We spend some time in IMF headquarters and there's the question of a possible mole working in the highest rankings of the organization (which, you'll remember, was also a big part of the first film). MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III brings the series back to the elements that I loved in the first movie while giving it a little more humanity and personal stakes. It was a fun improvement over John Woo's installment and almost as good as the original Brian De Palma film. A few years after this movie came out, it wouldn't matter as much anyway because Brad Bird would give us GHOST PROTOCOL, what I believe to be the best of the series and the one that blew all of the original three out of the water.