I Watch Films: Mission: Impossible III

 

Mission: Impossible III

Ethan Hunt has left the field as an IMF agent, now trains other agents. Their headquarters is in the Virginia Department Of Transport, and his cover is a traffic pattern analyst there. He’s engaged to a nurse, Julia Meade. He’s interrupted at their engagement party and goes out to meet his boss.

His protégé Lindsey Farris has been captured in Germany while investigating arms dealer Owen Davian. He flies out with a team, including Luther Stickell, the hacker from the previous two films, as well as Zhen Lei and Declan Gormley. They find and rescue Farris, but things go wrong; Farris has a bomb implanted in her head that they fail to defuse (with a defibrillator) killing her, and the only data they get is on damaged laptops.

Hunt and his team are reprimanded for this fiasco, so Hunt does not inform his boss when he receives a postcard from Farris with a microdot. IMF technician Benji Dunn recovers data from the laptops indicating that Davian will be in the Vatican to receive and then sell a mysterious item, the “Rabbit’s Foot.” On impulse Hunt and Julia get married in the hospital chapel. Without informing his boss Hunt and his team infiltrate the Vatican (Zhen Lei wearing a very inappropriate dress) and kidnap Davian. Hunt interrogates and threatens Davian who is unimpressed, promising to kill everyone Hunt cares about*.

Arriving in America Hunt is warned that the microdot contains a link between Davien and the IMF director. The convoy is ambushed and Davien escapes. Going to find Julia, Hunt finds she has been kidnapped; Davien calls to demand Hunt brings him the Rabbit’s Foot within 48 hours. Hunt is then arrested by the IMF, where the director accuses him of being in league with Davien. During the interrogation Hunt’s boss (not the director) passes on the message that the Rabbit’s Foot is in Shanghai and makes it possible for Hunt to escape.

In Shanghai Hunt meets his team, steals the Rabbit’s Foot in a spectacular heist, only to be drugged by Davien and have a bomb implanted in his head. The film now returns to the opening scene (a flash-forward) with Davien demanding the Rabbit’s Foot from Hunt and threatening Julia. The film then continues inevitably through several fights, chases, last minute rescues and tricks.

We’re never told what the Rabbit’s Foot is, and that’s good, though something director J J Abrams came to depend on. A Hitchcockian McGuffin, given some menace by Benji’s fable of what one of his mentors called the Anti-God, the worst thing, the one that can kill everyone. In the end the slightly oblique opening flash-forward neither helps nor harms the film as a whole. A dark tone at the start so we don’t begin with the sweet inconsequential engagement, but on the other hand some people we don’t know referring to things and events we haven’t seen in an aggravating way. We get all the ingredients, glamorous party heist, impregnable vault heist (entertainingly viewed from the outside), helicopters, chases, fights, jail breaks, a mission gone wrong and of course a rogue IMF agent -- again. Maybe they should shut the IMF down, I don’t know.

Watch This: Exciting action-packed thriller that twists and turns
Don’t Watch This: Gruesome threats, the dark opening scene hanging over the film without really offering much more than spectacle

* Presumably his aunt and uncle from M:I:1, as well as Julia