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Tom Cruise saves his girlfriend, Michelle Monaghan, in Mission: Impossible III.
Message to J.J. Abrams: “Good morning, Mr. Abrams. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make the third installment in the Mission Impossible film series, starring Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup, Michelle Monaghan, Laurence Fishburne, and Keri Russell, from a script written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and yourself. This film must be as good or better than the first two, as it is the first of the summer films to hit the box office and will need to be good to have the legs to make any real money. As always, if you or any member of your crew are injured or killed while carrying out this mission, the studio will deny any involvement. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck Mr. Abrams.”
Needless to say, he took the mission. The result is a third installment in the Mission Impossible series that finds the main character Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) no longer out in the field risking life and limb. Instead he is training others in the trade and has found true love with Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who thinks he is a Department of Transportation employee who studies traffic patterns while she works as a nurse.
Their engagement party is interrupted by a supervisor from the IMF agency, John Musgrave (Billy Crudup), who phones Hunt to ask him to go back into the field to rescue an agent that Hunt had trained who has been captured by an arms dealer. Hunt convinces himself to back out one last time to save Lindsey Ferris, who is like a little sister to him, and that choice sets him on course for a showdown with the arms dealer.
Owen Davian (Academy Award-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman) is that arms dealer, and Hunt devises a plan to kidnap him and bring him back to the U.S. for interrogation during a visit by Davian to Vatican City. I can think of few ironies greater than that of Tom Cruise, former seminary student, walking across the grounds of that locale in the garb of a priest.
The action gets even faster from this point forward and there is no point in ruining the most coherent story of the three MI films. If action is what you want, that’s what you will get, laden with high-tech effects, narrow escapes from danger and of course, twists and turns in a plot where who the other bad guy really is won’t become apparent until very late in the film.
When you look at Tom Cruise’s filmography, there are a lot of similarities between many of the characters he has played in the 20 years since he strapped on that F-14 Tomcat and flew into box-office stardom in Top-Gun. While Ethan Hunt is no exception, the difference here is that Hunt doesn’t swagger, and that is what I like about this character and this performance. There is a quiet understatement to Hunt, who isn’t cocky, but confident and gets the job done. There are moments of crisis for Hunt in this film where Cruise begins to approach the brilliance of his two best prior performances, in Magnolia and The Last Samurai. Maybe playing Ethan Hunt over and over again is allowing him to grow into the character?
The rest of the cast is good, Ving Rhames delivering a strong performance as always. The pacing is fast as an action film should be and as mentioned previous, adding a coherent story to an action film makes for a nice bonus. The real impossibility was making a third film in a series that was better than the first two, but director J.J. Abrams has managed to do it.
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