Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has retired from the field agent life, and now teaches the next generation of IMF superspies. He does this for love, for between the last film and now, he has not just apparently dropped a certain thief, never to be mentioned by the movie, but is also now very happily engaged to nurse Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who does know nothing of espionage or his true job.

Because that’s always the way, Ethan is drawn back into field service for a rescue operation of one Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell), his former favourite spy pupil who has gotten herself into a spot of bother. Somehow some quiet observations has resulted in her getting kidnapped by the insane international arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Ethan and his team – this time around Ving Rhames and Maggie Q with a bit of hometown help from Simon Pegg – manage to extract Lindsey, but she dies from an explosive capsule implanted in her head. Ethan’s out for revenge now, and while he’s at it, he might as well also grab a dangerous biological agent in Davian’s possession.

Davian’s not a man to be thwarted or threatened, however, and what’s a better move to make than threaten a superspy’s loved one? Further complications, including yet another traitor in the IMF, do of course ensue.

In Cruise years, we have now reached the point where he had acquired most of the needed acting tools for the kind of star he probably always wanted to be, and has allowed directors to tune down the frequency of shots of him grinning smugly for no good reason. Because we haven’t yet reached the 2010s, trying to come over like more of a human being – if an utterly perfect one who is good at everything, inhumanely hot, and so on, and so forth – is apparently of interest, too. Doing this by giving him a fiancée in one of those jobs Hollywood people would probably describe as “grounded” and “human”, and then threatening her is probably the least original way to go about that, apart from teaming him up with a monkey or a little child, but damn me if J.J. Abrams doesn’t do this efficiently as well as effectively. In part, the trick works as well as it does because Michelle Monaghan is really, really, good at projecting humanity back at unlikable male stars that isn’t actually coming from them, convincing us that something must actually be perfectly alright and decent with those guys. It’s a curious ability, but it works.

At least, this is the only one of the Mission Impossible movies that actually manages to make me root for Ethan instead of just watching the crazy plot contortions and absurd plans, explosions and shoot-outs he’s getting into while raising eyebrows at his boring perfection. So, while humanization by threatened significant other may be a primitive move, it does at least work.

Also livelier than in the movies before is the villain. On paper, Seymour Hoffman doesn’t actually have that much more to do than his predecessors, yet his precise performance and the greater pull of the plot sell him not just as an actual threat but also as a great counterpoint to Hunt, again making a protagonist who isn’t generally likeable more so by contrast.

The action set pieces make as little sense as we’ve grown used to from the series, but make up for that by a general sense of awesomeness and Abrams’s typical ability to shoot loud and obnoxiously conceived scenes as if they were sensible and natural. That he’s actually good with the spy bits of the superspy formula is another point in Mission Impossible III’s favour, leaving this a fine way to while away a few others.