Mission: Impossible III

Recommendation

Finally, we start getting to the good ones! If you’ve been binging the series, I would say that up until now it’s hard to understand what all the hype is about. Well, the wait is over because MI:3 is where the franchise really takes off.

The reservations I have about recommending the first two movies do not apply to this one. While it has all the familiar spy and Mission: Impossible tropes, it also has a very strong villain, and addresses some of the criticisms I raised about the first two movies. I can easily recommend this to anyone looking for an action or spy movie.

Thoughts

Higher Stakes

My biggest gripe with MI:2 was that there seemed to be no real stakes. Ethan was basically invincible, so we as an audience weren’t really worried about the eventual outcome of the movie. MI:3 addresses that fault almost immediately, as the first mission Ethan goes on is a complete failure. It results in the hostage they have gone to rescue having her brain exploded which is about as gruesome as it gets. This failure does a few things: first it helps us immediately understand Ethan’s motivations for continuing, it also makes us a lot less assured of his success, and it shows us that the villain in this one is not messing around.

Another area where this movie improves on its predecessors is with the love interest. In the second movie, the love interest was essentially a “bond-girl” whereas in this movie, Ethan has gotten involved with a regular person and we are able to see what his life would be like if he left the IMF. It provides many layers of tension and implies a longer and deeper relationship than the one week affair from the previous film. The movie then beautifully combines these two sources of tension to elevate the bad guy in a super creepy scene where he works out who Ethan is and laser focuses in on his new weak spot.

Ethan also really takes a beating in this movie. I mentioned how their first mission is a failure, but even their successes seem to be just coming together. In the final fight, Ethan has to be electrocuted to death just so the bomb in his head doesn’t explode and kill him in a way he can’t potentially be revived from. This is after a brutal fight through a hospital ending in him winning somewhat by luck.

Doomsday?

One problem that I have with the plot is that, again I don’t really feel like the team is stopping any sort of doomsday event. There is “the rabbits foot” but it’s unclear what this the actual danger is. We put together that it’s some sort of biological weapon, but they might as well have called it “the MacGuffin”.

In the end it doesn’t really matter because the suspense comes from whether or not Ethan will be able to get Julia back unharmed. We don’t really care about the weapon because we don’t have any idea of who is going to use it or why.