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Mission Impossible 3

I get so emotional, baby

2006

Review: May 12, 2006

Director: J.J. Abrams

Starring: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Monaghan, Ving Rhames, and many others

Probably would be useful.

THE SETUP:

More running and jumping and explosions and gadgets.

DISCUSSION:

Tom is going all On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with this one, which is all about what a very, very emotional person he truly is. He’s not a man who is afraid to cry. Oh no. And the whole movie is about his losing his cool while worrying about his wife and having to make choices, and… hey, don’t you agree that if Sean Connery would have been in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service it would have been the best Bond ever?

Alright, back to this one. We open with Tom a bit misty-eyed as it seems that he has until Philip Seymour Hoffman counts to ten to tell him where the MacGuffin is, or he’ll blow his wife’s head off. Tom does some fairly decent acting here, and it’s interesting to think about whether he’s bluffing about not knowing where the thingy is, and to what extent he’ll take risks with his wife’s life. It doesn’t turn out to be all that interesting by the time we curve back to this scene in the movie. Anyway, the wife gets her head blown off and with a ZING! we’re into the Mission: Impossible theme over the credits, leaving us feeling: are we really going to generate awesome excitement going into this movie from the idea that Tom Cruise just watched his wife’s brains get spattered across the floor? Hmmm, I guess we are.

So then we flash back to Tom’s engagement party, in which we confront the depressing reality that boring white people listen to The Emotions. But, as expected, it’s just “Best of My Love,” and I suppose the rest of their oeuvre remains undiscovered [can you name one Emotions song other than “Best of My Love?”]. During this time we also have the thought: “Oh, his girlfriend here DOES look a lot like Katie Holmes.” And since we know that the whole movie is going to be about Tom either saving his wife or watching her skull explode, the junior psychoanalysists in us are very eager for some juicy subtext. Not so much gratified, as it turns out.

So wouldn’t you know, Tom is called away to a mission right during his engagement party! So he jets off to Budapest or wherever and saves Keri Russell, who can manage a real mean face when she’s shooting. For that, I like her. Then there’s this helicopter chase, after a car chase [I think], where they fly a bunch of helicopters through this wind farm and administer health care while avoiding missiles. I had to laugh a few times at how this thing is constructed to grab the maximum amount of peril possible, for example when the non-flying, non-martial artist Asian is hanging out of the helicopter BY the defibrillator that they need to save Keri Russell from having her brain melted into mush [it’s all about melted brains]. Then Tom goes home to his girlfriend, and she wants to know all about his secret life, but he can’t tell her, and this brings a tear to his eye, and they decide to get married right then. The ceremony, a quick, impulsive justice-of-the-peace type-thing, is excruciating, especially when they whip out these cutesy Mickey Mouse rings from a vending machine and everyone including the pastor starts beaming about just how very adorable this is. Then it’s back to the mission for Tom, and more heart-to-hearts with Ving Rhames, who seems to only want to have deep relationship talks AS Tom is trying to blow up a building or whatever.

Now, I’m going to talk about the rest of the movie and give away it’s ending the further you go on, so if you’re interested in not knowing the twists then you’d better stop now. I found it relatively tedious and too “on eleven” the whole time, but many people are saying it’s the best of the three and that they like it, so take that as you may.

SPOILERS > > >
So Tom goes off on some mission, I actually forget exactly which mission this was, but I think it’s to kidnap Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whose name is Davian, which I would guess is supposed to sound vaguely like Damian. And we all know that Damian’s are all evil.

So the requisite hot Asian [who, unlike most Asians, cannot fly] wears a sexy red dress that is cut all the way down her side for an AUDIENCE WITH THE POPE. I guess audiences with the Pope are like swank cocktail parties. Who knew? Then they foolishly demystify the whole mask-making process, which I thought was a mistake, and there’s this female security guard who keeps asking the Asian woman to “please step back,” even though it’s obvious that the Asian doesn’t speak English, and then two seconds later the bodyguard is speaking Mandarin or whatever!

So anyway they kidnap Davian, and right away, like literally first words out of his mouth, are “do you have a wife or girlfriend?” Well, what luck that the psychotic madman of the week would just happen to have a thing about girlfriends the DAY after you got married! You know, there really are no accidents.

So after hanging Davian out the bottom of a plane and asking him where the thingy they need is [and I’m like: how would they be able to hear him over the wind, if he choose to tell them?], then we have the whole bridge scene like you saw in the trailer, and Davian gets away, presumably straight to go pick up Cruise’s wife. And Tom gets a call that he has 48 hours to pick up the MacGuffin or it’s splatto time for the better half. So he emotes.

In here also, by the way, we have had Cruise play “We Are Family” throughout the mission office while humiliating a black man. Around in here you also wonder, how can this organization plan a decent mission when all of its agents are always out on their own unauthorized rogue operations? And one thing that was really getting to me: these people haven’t slept in four days! I guess they have super-strong coffee in IMF headquarters. By the way, IMF here does NOT stand for ‘International Monetary Fund,” but for ‘Impossible Mission Foundation’ or something like that.

Anyway [big-time spoilers until the end mark] turns out that Cruise’s wife didn’t get her head blown off after all, and furthermore it isn’t Davian who did it. And at this point I was like: So why am I watching this whole movie? I guess the bad guy they’ve been chasing this whole time had nothing to do with anything? But it turns out that some white guy at the IMF is colluding with Davian and setting up the black guy, who he refers to as an “affirmative action poster boy.” Now, here we have a white character being all evil by being racist, but earlier we have had the MOVIE itself play “We Are Family,” a song with tremendous racial resonance, while it asks the audience to engage in a laugh at the expense of a black guy, and with the song, the entire idea of black achievement. So the movie is just tone-deaf in many ways, and doesn’t really even know what it’s saying.

And also, if it turns out to be the IMF who faked injecting the cranial explosive into Tom, then why is his head gonna explode in the last scene?

Turns out Davian really is still on the loose and really does have Cruise’s wife. It also turns that Ms. Cruise, completely untrained, is quite a little sniper. I have been seeing this in movies a lot lately: the idea that you, too, are a total ninja who is only waiting for the right circumstances to bring it out, at which point you will raise your bulk from the couch and hurl Doritos like throwing stars to destroy your opponent.

Then they kill Tom and bring him back, but for a while the music gets all sad and piano-y and you start thinking “God, what if he dies? This is the third movie, maybe they’ll kill him! Die Tom! Die!” but he lives, and it turns out that having a foreign object in your brain for the rest of your life really isn’t going to cause any foreseeable problems. Then Bush [presumably] offers Tom a job at the White House! Then he goes with his wife and tells her the whole story about how he’s a secret agent, and she doesn’t worry that her new husband could be killed at almost any time, and that she herself and any potential offspring they have will always be a target or potential murder or kidnapping. No worries! Love really is all you need.
< < < SPOILERS END

So, overall? Overall just too much on eleven. This film is 80% action and 20% Tom looking sad. And… does EVERYTHING have to be impossible? Can’t some things just be improbable? Or unlikely? The constant OTT-ness of the action got to me and started to make the whole thing just tedious. Not to mention that the acknowledged "MacGuffin-ness" of the whole story struck me as a big bird-flip to the audience. I began to wish I was watching the first one instead. Now, obviously I love Brian De Palma, and I love the two signature set-pieces he had in that first movie, but that’s kind of the point: that movie had TWO massive action scenes, and the rest was all intrigue, so the movie had a shape and a rhythm. But that was before the experience of a summer action film wasn’t akin to sticking your head in a hornet’s nest and jumping up and down and screaming for two hours.

And there was virtually no Mission: Impossible theme here, which annoyed me. And how come it’s Mission COLON Impossible COLON Three? The mission: is impossible. The impossible: is three? It just doesn’t make sense [yes, I know that I use brackets when I should use parentheses]. At least the construction of M:I-2 made sense. Oh, and the direction is really TV-style, too. I want to watch the first one now.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

If you must.