Whatever you think of the them individually or collectively,
it’s a fact that Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible
movies have pulled the trigger on exactly the sorts of exciting
authorial and tonal risks that the James Bond franchise has recently been too shy to take. For the third installment in the
secret agent franchise, being peddled by the cutesy promotional tag of
M:i:III,
Alias creator J.J. Abrams — for whom Cruise delayed production for a year after
Narc director Joe Carnahan left the project — gives us his flashy, characteristically labyrinthine spin on the genre.
Like its producer-star, M:i:III
is a hardworking, good-looking movie that desperately wants to be all
things to all people — in this case a love story, a balls-to-the-wall
actioner, a breathlessly paced mystery of personal betrayal. With
near-unlimited resources and dogged tunnel vision, it bends over
backwards in its concurrent pursuit of these disparate agendas, and
even achieves considerable short-term success on most counts. The cost,
though, ultimately comes off the back end; similar in some respects to
the convoluted 1996 original, M:i:III is that rarest of breeds — a summer popcorn movie that might be called both excessively clamorous and an intellectual overreach.
A significant part of the film unspools as a sort of play-acted
version of Cruise’s very public and weirdly declamatory relationship
with Katie Holmes, with his covert ops agent Ethan Hunt now out of the
field and comfortably ensconced in a wide-eyed courtship with Julia (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s Michelle Monaghan), a nurse who believes Hunt works for the Department of Transportation. They’re engaged (crazy in love,
you see!), but when a former agent trainee (Keri Russell) gets nabbed
by sadistic and elusive arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour
Hoffman), Hunt finds himself — at the behest of his friend and
immediate boss, John Musgrave (Billy Crudup) — coerced back into
action.
After a botched extraction operation in Germany, Hunt comes across
some intel that places Davian in Vatican City the following evening, so
he takes the further ennobling step of intensely tearing up and
arranging a quickie marriage (at the hospital where Julia works?)
before re-teaming with a squad of faces both old and new (Ving Rhames,
Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q) to intercept a highly expensive
weapon known only by its code name, the “Rabbit’s Foot.” Keeping
Impossible Missions Force Chief Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne)
out of the loop, Hunt kidnaps Davian, only to have him escape before he
can get him all the way back to IMF headquarters in suburban Virginia.
From there, a timed and tense game of cat and mouse ensues, with Davian
endangering Julia and Hunt literally racing around the globe to
retrieve the items he needs in order to ensure his new bride’s safe
return.
Scripted by Abrams and his fellow Alias scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, M:i:III
is crisp in its shorthand and confident in its action staging, which
include a Shanghai high-rise siege, Davian’s high-octane escape and the
breach of the Vatican. In compressing for feature film length the sort
of head feints and twists that might play best over a full season of
episodic television, though, the film suffers significant pains. (It
also, during a climactic revelation, suffers a rather unfortunate,
howlingly delusional line of dialogue given the current state of world
affairs.) There’s a cool detachment to the self-contained and
self-absorbed narrative, with the chief irony being that the more
complicated the plot gets, the more emasculated Hoffman is as a
villain. Davian is a bad man, but as rendered here a bit of, if not a
herring, then at least a resolutely indefinable entity. The more
conspiratorial collusion Hunt uncovers, the absolute less sense some of
the actions of Davian and others make.
Lest I be derided as a killjoy, it must be stressed that M:i:III
generally hits all its beats, both dutifully and robustly. It’s a
well-made film. While none of the action sequences quite measure up to
the Langley computer-room break-in of Brian De Palma’s original, and
they eventually additionally reach a point of critical mass;
you at
least leave M:i:III entertained — if exhausted and chuckling a bit at the sheer, maniacal and exposed effort of its spectacle. (Paramount, PG-13, 125 mins.) 
