Thrilling, memorable and featuring the best acting the franchise has ever had

Rating: 9/10 (23 August 2015)

The main problem that has faced this franchise is that the newer installments are less consistently memorable, but the originals are lesser in quality. However, I'm fairly certain that JJ Abrams' Mission Impossible 3 sits squarely in the middle of those two issues and does both well enough to make it my favourite of the lot.
Ethan Hunt has retired from field ops and is now teaching and happily engaged to the lovely Jules (a delightful Michelle Monaghan who is just right for the part). He is dragged back into the job when one of his students is compromised on an espionage mission. Throughout the film, dual loyalties and suspicions are unearthed like in every one of these films, but this one does so with great suspense and doesn't feel like its just going through the motions. The problem with this franchise is that very few characters actually carry over between films, so the film has to build up and establish all of the new characters. We need to therefore spend heaps of time building up Hunt's friendship with Musgrave in order to misdirect his later betrayal. Because of this, Hunt's team of Maggie Q and Jonathan Reith-Meyers become mere afterthoughts – which makes it hard to accept that they go rogue to help him later on.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian is an absolutely incredible villain – not only the best this franchise has ever had but one of the great cinematic villains of all time in my opinion. He is utterly ruthless and without remorse and when Hunt is at his mercy I was truly tense. But the difference between a great villain and a great performance is the quality of actor and Academy Award Winner Hoffman really outdoes himself. In a scene which most of us probably forget, Hunt must impersonate Davian and appears in a Davian mask and voice. Hoffman manages to capture Cruise's pure essence – his intense stare, his frenetic gestures and even his charm. Its absolutely incredible work from Hoffman. Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames are always great in these movies – and this is probably the only movie outside the original where Rhames is fully utilised – and there's a terrific performance by Laurence Fishburne thrown in. Fishburne gets some of the best lines in the film and delivers then with a scathing wit.
The film focuses on Davian's pursuit of a Macguffin called the "rabbit's foot" and Abrams is way too coy trying to keep it mysterious. There is a point where ambiguity just starts getting frustrating (wait this guy made Lost? Hmmm I see the pattern). The film has a couple of great action set pieces and JJ Abrams sculpts it well to create fear and helplessness. For whatever reason, Abrams decides not to show us Hunt's capture of the Rabbit's Foot in China, focusing on his boring and forgettable teammates in the van. Maybe he wanted to slow it down between action scenes, but come on man.
The film is very relentlessly edited, with an average of 2 second per cut in some of the action sequences (yet there's time for a 20 second uninterrupted shot of Tom Cruise running) which makes watching the whole thing a headache to watch – one really has to absorb it as a whole rather than being able to watch it. But that's not to say Abrams isn't a good director – the film's opening scene (which is revealed in context later on) is one of the best directed, scripted and acted scenes I've ever seen.
Mission Impossible 3 has the memorability of the early films and the quality of the latter. I don't think I'll ever forgive JJ Abrams for steering Lost off the road and into a time portal, but he makes a great movie here with high quality acting and a decent plot.