It’s funny how an age obsessed with plagiarism and “intellectual property” rights takes to movies that are largely made up of ideas from other movies. Tom Cruise’s most successful franchise now delivers its third instalment, Mission: Impossible III, and it’s mildly amusing to sit and count the borrowings from elsewhere in the spy-thriller movie canon.
Of course, the whole concept is very James Bond, with agent Ethan Hunt working for a secret government agency that specialises in the most difficult jobs in international espionage. The TV series that started the Mission: Impossible concept in the 1960s presumably had the earliest Bond movies at the back of its mind. (Appropriately, the new movie is directed by JJ Abrams — his first feature after his television triumphs Alias and Lost.)
In M:i:III (to use the official abbreviation), Ethan Hunt has put all those leggy babes itching for casual sex behind him, and is about to get married. That’s straight from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (though luckily for Ethan his marriage doesn’t play out as tragically as in that Bond novel and movie). Naturally, his fiancée Julia (Michelle Monaghan) is unaware of his status as a secret agent — just like Jamie Lee Curtis in the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies. And any viewer with half a functional brain cell will know immediately that Ethan’s lovely fiancée/wife is going to get kidnapped by the baddies, which of course duly happens, as it does in … Well, I’ll leave you to list the movies and TV episodes where that takes place.
Actually, you don’t even need a half-functional brain cell, because the movie proper is prefaced with a piece of the climax, in which we see Ethan and Julia tied to chairs with the villain looming over them, about to blow out Julia’s brains if Ethan won’t give him the information he wants. I don’t know whether that little prelude was intended by the filmmakers or was just an integral part of the glitch-ridden premiere at Montecasino, but it would, in any case, have been entirely predictable from the moment the credits segued into a party sequence with Ethan and Julia announcing their engagement.
I can’t remember what Ethan Hunt was saving the world from in the first Mission: Impossible (it was, after all, directed by Brian de Palma, who has a special way of scrambling the plot of any film he directs); in the second movie, it was some dreadful virus that was going to wipe out swathes of humanity, starting in Australia. I wondered, as I sat in the traffic for an hour on the way to Montecasino, what it would be in M:i:III (and what’s with the colon mania?). Cleverly, this time round the filmmakers manage to whip up all the usual froth around an entirely absent centre, and we never find out exactly what the mysterious “Rabbit’s Foot” is that everyone’s going crazy about, and around which all this frantic whiz-bang action revolves.
So far so good. We’ve got the villain (Philip Seymour Hoffman, punching way below his actorly weight) who gets personal with Ethan Hunt, kidnapping his beloved Julia, and so on. We’ve also got some internal rivalry in Hunt’s agency, with a senior colleague fingered as a betrayer in league with the villain, hence several plot twists — all of which have to be explained by Billy Crudup in a longish speech toward the end. At least it’s more-or-less explicable.
Not that any of this plot stuff really matters; it’s all an excuse for the relentless action, and M:i:III delivers on that. Instead of the rather stylised, flying-through-the-air ballets of brutality provided by John Woo in number II, here we have a somewhat more realistic kind of action, which is to say that the camera is jostled about wildly whenever anything violent is going on, as if the action were being shot by a war reporter ducking bullets at the same time. This touch of contrived verité produces a bit of the reality effect when needed, and it works well to toughen up the action, though anyone with the slightest tendency to get airsick will start feeling nauseous within the first 15 minutes.
To my mind, this is the best of the Mission: Impossible movies so far. It reshuffles the clichés efficiently and gives them a new gloss without noticeably disturbing any of the expectations of the average fan, who in fact wants more of the same, only more so. Presumably such fans can live with Cruise himself, who is of course rather irritating (especially in the tearfully emotional scenes with Monaghan), but does have the unique talent of being able to run at great speed while still looking as though he has a large carrot up his ass.
It’s also fun to note that the secret agency for which Ethan Hunt works is called the IMF. We are told, in the movie’s closing moments, that this stands for Impossible Mission Force, but it’s entertaining to speculate, while the movie is running, that it in fact stands for the International Monetary Fund. That venerable institution could doubtless do with some high-tech action heroes to collect all that outstanding Third World debt. An idea, perhaps, for Mission: Impossible IV? Come on, Ethan Hunt — go get that money from Zimbabwe!