Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Retired from active duty, and training recruits for the Impossible Mission Force, agent Ethan Hunt faces the toughest foe of his career: Owen Davian, an international broker of arms and information, who's as cunning as he is ruthless. Davian emerges to threaten Hunt and all that he holds dear – including the woman Hunt loves.
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Some may look a little borrowed (like the missile attack on the bridge, a la True Lies), but the rest hums along with breathtaking buzz.
He’s in love with and preparing to marry Julia (Michelle Monaghan), a nurse who thinks he works in the public transportation field (cue one of many blatant True Lies rip-offs).
MI3 has a lot in common with the last great Arnold Schwarzenegger movie True Lies.
And in spite of a few visually striking locations, we've seen all this stuff too many times before and better, most notably in James Cameron's True Lies.
The first two acts of M:I:3 (or MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII) move with a nice energy, distracting us as best it can from the not-so-vague similarities to both Mr. & Mrs. Smith and True Lies (one of the action scenes � involving jets & missiles, no less - is even set on the bridge of the Florida Keys) and Hunt turning into 24�s Jack Bauer during an airplane interrogation.
Taking a page (scads of pages actually) from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with a dose of True Lies tossed in for good measure, Abrams decided to give Impossible Mission Force Agent Hunt a girlfriend/fiancee/wife, Julia (cutely called “Jules”).
He is taunting Ethan, who is also bound (but not gagged) in the same room, threatening to kill her if Ethan doesn’t tell him how he can put his hands on a fearsome instrument of terror known as the “rabbit’s foot,” this movie’s equivalent of the by now overly familiar MacGuffin—though no one in any of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies ever actually used that term to describe, for example, the secret clause of a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940), or the plans for new weapons in The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959), or the nuclear materials in Notorious (1946).
He is taunting Ethan, who is also bound (but not gagged) in the same room, threatening to kill her if Ethan doesn’t tell him how he can put his hands on a fearsome instrument of terror known as the “rabbit’s foot,” this movie’s equivalent of the by now overly familiar MacGuffin—though no one in any of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies ever actually used that term to describe, for example, the secret clause of a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940), or the plans for new weapons in The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959), or the nuclear materials in Notorious (1946).
He is taunting Ethan, who is also bound (but not gagged) in the same room, threatening to kill her if Ethan doesn’t tell him how he can put his hands on a fearsome instrument of terror known as the “rabbit’s foot,” this movie’s equivalent of the by now overly familiar MacGuffin—though no one in any of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies ever actually used that term to describe, for example, the secret clause of a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940), or the plans for new weapons in The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959), or the nuclear materials in Notorious (1946).
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J.J. Abrams lists his filmmaking abilities, as they date back to 1982 on the low budget horror movie "Nightbeast," to include writer, producer, director, actor, composer, miscellaneous crew and sound department.
While Davian doesn't measure up to the best of the modern era bad guys, Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber in Die Hard, he's much better than the cookie cutter, run-of-the-mill antagonists that thrillers like this typically employ.
The 80s featured juiced-up bad guys with maniacal stares (like Gary Busey in “Lethal Weapon”), and suave foreign operators named Hans (Alan Rickman in “Die Hard”).
Taking a page (scads of pages actually) from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with a dose of True Lies tossed in for good measure, Abrams decided to give Impossible Mission Force Agent Hunt a girlfriend/fiancee/wife, Julia (cutely called “Jules”).
They've taken the On Her Majesty's Secret Service route this time around, with Ethan marrying poor screamer/hostage Jules (a thanklessly cast Michelle Monaghan), who, in the prologue, appears to be shot in the head by evil something or other Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman, looking more than a little like a wax effigy of himself).
As if culled from Abrams's DVD collection, M:i:III's inconsequential plot synthesizes elements from—and offers random nods to—numerous sources (the work of De Palma and Hitchcock, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Total Recall, Born on the Fourth of July) in recounting IMF agent Ethan Hunt's (Cruise) globe-trotting quest to recover a mysterious MacGuffin known as the Rabbit's Foot from wicked Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who's also abducted Hunt's new wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan).
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Had a pop artist handled this, the franchise could have had its On Her Majesty's Secret Service; with machines directing machines, however, it's closer to its Live and Let Die.
Abrams, who was recruited by Cruise after original director Joe Carnahan ("Narc") exited, keeps things sprightly and brisk but lacks the flourish of his predecessors.