Spy Thriller or Social Message?
M:I-3 Brings Politics to Action Movies

When Mission: Impossible debuted in theaters back in 1996, I did something I had never done before. In fact, I dare say that very few people had done it before. I wrote a review of the film and posted it to the World Wide Web. Yes, it was my first film review, and although it has long since been lost in the electronic ether, I remember fondly the trouble I went through to code the HTML by hand and upload the file to my personal account. With Mission: Impossible III, I'm reminded how much has changed in our world and in our fictions.

Mission: Impossible III
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, left) tracks an arms dealer who killed an IMF agent in Mission: Impossible III. (Paramount, 2006)
Directed by: J.J. Abrams
Written by: J.J. Abrams & Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci
Starring: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, and Billy Crudup

Rated PG-13 (for intense sequences of frenetic violence and menace, disturbing images and some sensuality)
Running time: 126 min.

FilmGuru's Rating : 6 out of 10.

M:I III begins with a bang, as we see the delightfully villainous Owen Davien (Philip Seymour Hoffman) torturing IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) for information. It becomes immediately apparent that this is the future, something to come, and it whets the audience's appetite for the next two hours.

The story flashes back to find Ethan Hunt enjoying an ordinary life. He and his fiancée, a beautiful woman named Julia (Michelle Monaghan), are hosting a party. He engages in idle chit-chat about work in the department of transportation. It seems idyllic until he gets one of those inevitable calls from the office -- the one he doesn't tell Julia about.

Even though Hunt is no longer in the field, he has been asked by Musgrave (Billy Crudup) to help recover a missing IMF agent. Although she was captured by the bad guys, the IMF fears that the information she possesses is too valuable to "disavow" her. The appeal to Hunt is a personal one because agent Ferris (Keri Russell) is one of his trainees.

Davien, the arms dealer that Ferris was investigating, has been at the top of the wanted lists, but no one has been able to touch him. When some data the team recovered pinpoints Davien's whereabouts, Hunt organizes a team to stage a daring kidnapping within Vatican City. Getting to Davien is only the first part of the story, however, and there are so many twists and turns that audiences will be left breathless.

Ultimately, the story is about Hunt and whether or not his life in the IMF will make it impossible to have a normal life. When love is on the line, what happens to loyalty, friendship, and national security? The believability for the hero slips toward the end when his motivation is overshadowed by emotion. This is not to say that one character won't do something completely contrary to his nature out of love, it's just a hard sell. I didn't believe it, and I felt that the resulting plot hole was large enough to drive a truck through.

The politics of M:I III make it clear that this is not the same world we lived in ten years ago. Then, it was unbelievable that Jim Phelps could be a bad guy. Now, it's just second nature to assume the worst about our own government agencies.

When I heard that J.J. Abrams had been tapped to direct Mission: Impossible III, I didn't think much of it. True, the second film had problems, but I felt the worst lay with the story not John Woo's direction. While I appreciate what Abrams has done on television with ABC's outstanding series Lost, I continued to see visions of Alias star Jennifer Garner or Felicity's Keri Russell. I didn't think he had proved himself as a film director.

What Abrams brings to the latest film in the M:I franchise is the tight storytelling that comes from trying to wedge a complete episode into a one-hour timeframe. This isn't to say that Abrams doesn't slip up. His penchant for happy endings makes this film ultimately predictable. The destination is rather obvious, but the twists keep the audience from guessing how Abrams is going to get them there.

All in all, my biggest problem with M:I III had nothing to do with the story or its direction. Like many others, I have reached my saturation point with Tom Cruise in the media. Because of the actor, I had a hard time seeing the character of Ethan Hunt. One might say, I was unable to see the forest for the trees. If so, perhaps Tom's publicity agent needs to do some pruning.