by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched Mission: Impossible III,
the third in the series of movies produced
by Paramount Pictures based on the 1960’s hit TV series (which Paramount
acquired — like another highly successful franchise, Star Trek — when Paramount purchased the original producers,
Lucille Ball’s Desilu Studios, in 1967) and starring Tom Cruise as IMF (in the
movie it stands for Impossible Mission Force; in real life the initials mean
the International Monetary Fund, which might actually have been a better
“cover” identity for the central character than the odd one they supplied him as a staff member of the Virginia Department of Transportation) agent Ethan Hunt. Charles and I watched the
first episode on VHS when it came out in that format in 1996 but avoided the
three more recent entries in the cycle until now. Mission: Impossible
III was released in 2006 and became more
famous for the antics of Tom Cruise off-screen than anything he did on-screen.
It was while doing the talk-show circuit to promote this movie that he started
jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch proclaiming his love for his new
girlfriend, Katie Holmes (they have since broken up) and telling Brooke Shields
she should stop taking medications (the drug he specifically said she should get
off of was Depakote, which contrary to press reports at the time is an
anti-seizure medication and not a
psychotropic) on the basis of Cruise’s belief in Scientology and particularly
its preachments against psychiatry in general and psychotropic drugs in
particular. This got Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner, fired from
Paramount — they were hired by whoever owned MGM at the time to resuscitate
MGM’s failed subsidiary, United Artists, but after making three movies there
Cruise and Wagner broke up their partnership and the attempt to revive UA
quietly died — and though Cruise eventually returned to Paramount to do a Mission:
Impossible IV (and a fifth episode is
already in pre-production), it was for quite a lot less money and control.
Mission:
Impossible III was also the feature-film
debut of director J. J. Abrams, who since then has done two movies in a Star
Trek reboot as well as the interesting if
ultimately unsatisfying Super 8
(a domestic horror-drama that probably would have been better if its producer,
Steven Spielberg, had directed as well), though he wasn’t the original choice:
Joe Carnahan worked on the project for a year and a half, shot a few scenes
that ended up in the final cut, but then was fired and replaced by Abrams, who
had attracted the studio’s attention for his TV series Lost and Alias. The film begins with a grim scene in which Ethan and a woman whom we
later find out is his wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), are being held hostage
by villainous international arms dealer Owen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman —
this is the first time we’ve watched a film of his since he died, and while
it’s not one of the credits for which he’s likely to be remembered he still dominates every scene he’s in), who’s torturing
Ethan and threatening to kill Julia unless Ethan gets him something called the
“Rabbit’s Foot.” Then there’s an abrupt cut to Ethan and Julia hosting a party
— and it soon becomes apparent that the opening is a flash-forward, though
Abrams and his writers (Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci) don’t specify that; as
much as I’ve lampooned the frequent titles on Lifetime movies that say “_____
days/months/years earlier” after the dramatic flash-forward scene, we sure
could have used one here!
It seems that in honor of his upcoming marriage,
Ethan has taken himself off active duty with the IMF and is content to train
agents, and his first protégée is Lindsay Farris (Keri Russell), who’s been
captured in Berlin (this time the title reads, “Berlin Germany,” with no comma and the country name in
smaller type, no doubt so we won’t confuse it with “Berlin Botswana”) and whom Ethan and his old team —
Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise who’s been in all
four Missions: Impossible), John
Musgrave (Billy Crudup), Declan Gormley (the well-overqualified Jonathan Rhys
Meyers), Zhen Lei (Maggie Q, an electrifying Asian-looking actress who quite
frankly would have made a much
more interesting romantic interest for Tom Cruise than the relatively bland
Michelle Monaghan) and their IT guy back at HQ, Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) — are
sent to “Berlin Germany” to
rescue. Only they blow it — Davian has inserted an explosive charge into her
brain (I’m not making this up, you know!) and sets it off, and though they’re
supposed to be able to stop the explosive from detonating by using a
defibrillator to stop her heart, then restart it again, they blow it and kill
her instead. (I can’t help but think the use of a defibrillator is yet another
gimmick in which the Mission: Impossible
franchisees are trying to keep up with the Bonds: the latest remake of Casino
Royale also used a defibrillator as a key
plot gimmick.) Ethan and crew get read new assholes by their boss, Theodore
Brassel (Laurence Fishburne), and their next attempt to capture Davian occurs
at the Vatican, where he’s gone to meet potential buyers for his stolen terror
weapons under cover of the Vatican City’s status as a sovereign state. They
work out an elaborate plan to kidnap Davian by disguising Ethan as him
(including 3-D printing a rubber mask of Davian and forcing the real Davian to
read a paragraph containing all the phonemes of the English language so they
can feed it into a vocoder and thereby alter Tom Cruise’s voice to sound like
Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s; since their disguise was so good that it also
altered Cruise’s shape to
resemble Hoffman’s, I suspect Hoffman took Cruise’s place for these scenes), in
the course of which they also disguise Ethan as a priest (unable to resist
making a joke about Scientology sometime every time we watch a Tom Cruise movie, I said, “He was really
convincing as a priest — until he started babbling about OT’s, Level VII and
Xenu”).
Davian says he’ll escape and threaten Ethan’s significant other — he
doesn’t know for sure Ethan has
one (though he runs her down with the usual near-superhuman ease of a villain
in one of these sorts of sagas) — and ultimately kill her, which provokes Ethan
to open the bomb-bay doors of the plane they’re flying and threaten to push
Davian out of it until the other members of his team remind him that Davian is
worth more to them alive than dead. Only Davian’s people catch on that he is still alive and send attack aircraft to rescue him
while he’s in transit down a Washington, D.C. causeway. A clue planted by
Lindsay Farris (ya remember Lindsay Farris?) — a video concealed in a microdot — supposedly “outs” Brassel as a
“mole,” ostensibly leading the IMF but actually working for Davian, which would
be a legitimate reversal (kind of believable given the range of characters
Laurence Fishburne has played in his previous movies — we wonder whether he’s
supposed to be the “good” Fishburne of Morpheus in the three Matrices or the “bad” Fishburne who played Ike Turner and
Othello), though eventually there’s a double reversal: the real “mole” is Musgrave, who’s realized that if you kill
one Davian two more will spring up and it’s important to work with him and
sacrifice a few agents along the way in order to trace the terrorist leaders to
whom he’s selling hardware. Eventually Davian kidnaps Julia and takes her to
“Shanghai China” — once again, the
title reads that so we don’t think we’re in “Shanghai Monaco” — and I couldn’t help but reflect that a few days before
Charles and I had watched Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 film Shanghai Express, also a Paramount production with a temperamental
star (Marlene Dietrich) whose career had some spectacular ups and downs, but
despite its own flaws a far more sophisticated and powerful piece of work; it
was just a coincidence, but the comparison didn’t help this movie seem any
better.
The idea is that he’ll hold her hostage to get Ethan to steal him
something called the “Rabbit’s Foot,” which we never find out exactly what it
is — though it’s in a clear plastic canister and there’s a biohazard symbol on
it, so it’s obviously some sort of biological agent that can be used as the
basis for a weapon — which, in the film’s most spectacular sequence, Ethan
steals by spectacularly rappelling down one-third of a 200-plus story building
in a scene that suggests Batman might have been a more appropriate superhero
for Tom Cruise to play than Ethan Hunt or Jack Reacher. (I’m still avoiding Cruise’s Jack Reacher film out of disgust that someone so short as the 5’
7” Cruise was hired to play Lee Child’s 6’ 4” hero — damnit, it should have
been my hero, Christopher Meloni!
— even though Child himself inexplicably signed off on the casting.) I give
Abrams and his writers credit for trying to flesh out the bones of these
cardboard characters — a career vs. family conflict isn’t exactly the world’s
freshest plot gimmick (Cruise encountered it as early as Top Gun, where his married friend in the service — played by
Anthony Edwards, whom I actually found considerably sexier than his co-star —
got killed in the manner of innumerable 1930’s and 1940’s movies in which
married police officers, firefighters, FBI agents or, once World War II
started, servicemembers, got offed in the line of duty while their single
partners survived) but at least it’s something to put some meat on these old bones — but ultimately
Mission: Impossible III became
yet another high-tech version of an old Republic serial, with shards of plot
designed only to move us from one action sequence to another. I was amused when
I noted that the film had been rated “R” “for intense sequences of frenetic
violence and menace, disturbing images and some sensuality” — let’s face it, “intense sequences of
frenetic violence and menace” are the only reason you go to see a movie like this!
When I looked up Mission:
Impossible III on imdb.com I was amused
that the user review that came up, submitted by someone or something called
“bob the moo” from the U.K., was headlined, “Provides plenty of bangs for the
buck but lacks tension or excitement beyond the superficial,” because that
pretty much summed up my feeling towards the movie: I liked it better as it
went on and I ceased expecting it
to make any sense, which meant I could accept it for what it was and not look
in vain for something it wasn’t and wasn’t intended to be. When I wrote about
the first Mission: Impossible
movie with Cruise I invoked the name of St. Alfred Hitchcock: “I couldn’t watch
it without thinking of how much more Hitchcock — the real one — could have made of the central premise
(Impossible Missions Force agent Tom Cruise is set up to look like a ‘mole’ in
the CIA and has to deal with both good guys and bad guys in his efforts to keep himself alive and
out of jail and at the same time hunt down the real mole) — indeed, Hitchcock did make a much better movie out of a similar story
(though with a far more naïve central character) in North by
Northwest 37 years ago!” But the skill of
Hitchcock and his great
predecessors, Sternberg and especially Fritz Lang, at making movies that dealt
with the world of espionage that offered thrills and drew audiences and also contained multidimensional characters and sounded
emotional depths seems to be a lost art today. It also seems churlish that
Michael Giacchino got sole credit for the music — nary a mention of Lalo
Schifrin, the former Dizzy Gillespie pianist who wrote the original Mission:
Impossible TV show theme, even though not
only is the big theme heard at least three times in this movie (in different
arrangements) but some of the other cues Schifrin wrote for the TV series
appear as well.
