Mission: Impossible III – The many joys of the franchise’s most underrated film

Of course, Ethan Hunt was in love in Mission: Impossible III (2006). Just before he began filming, Tom Cruise was going around the world publicising Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) – accompanied by then-partner Katie Holmes. The third instalment of the Mission: Impossible (M:I) franchise came out almost exactly a year after Cruise jumped on the couch of the Oprah Winfrey show and announced being in love in front of the whole world. A month later, Cruise’s interview with Matt Lauer would become a totem of celebrity interviews, with the then 42-year-old star ranting about psychiatry being a ‘pseudoscience’.  

The conversation would veer towards Scientology, his chosen faith. Between this and the wall-to-wall coverage of ‘Tom-Kat’, the PR fatigue around him was understandable as the release of M:I III drew close in May 2006. There was too much Tom Cruise on our TVs, magazines, newspapers back then and it became increasingly hard to separate the actor—from the star, from the pound of meat for the paparazzi, and that intense figure staring down a TV host after he made a careless comment on kids on ritalin (a drug used to treat Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD). 

Even as the brand ‘Tom Cruise’ was at an all-time high (if PR managers measured it purely by the curiosity around it), the firefighting also became a weekly/monthly thing for the star’s reps. And adjacent to all this spicy fluff, was the relatively staid, straightforward and sincere Mission: Impossible III.  

Directed by JJ Abrams (making his feature film debut after being known as the creator of Lost), the third film would follow the struggles of Ethan Hunt, the family man. Putting behind his days as a flirty spy, Cruise would embrace Hunt’s search for middle-age ‘stability’. Having to balance his life between love and a higher calling (looking back, one might spot parallels between Katie Holmes and Scientology), the film transports us right into the meat in the very first scene. 

Notorious arms-dealer Owen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is holding a gun to Julia’s (Michelle Monaghan) head, as a severely beaten, distraught Ethan Hunt watches, tied to a chair. If he doesn’t answer a question till the count of 10, Davian will shoot Julia. Whatever one might think of Cruise’s celebrity, his chops as a mainstream actor/star are just undeniable. As Davian counts down, it’s stunning to see Hunt go from being disoriented and filled with rage to bargaining and begging for Julia’s life. It sets up the emotional stakes for the film. The scene also benefits with an actor of Hoffman’s prestige, taking one of the most cliched scenes in film history (of a villain threatening a hero by hurting a loved one), and elevating it with his sheer conviction.  

M:I III grounded Hunt as a haunted spy, who would like to go back home to ‘normalcy’, after averting a nuclear event with seconds left on the clock. To its credit, Monaghan’s Julia isn’t patronised—something that tended to happen to many actresses working with Cruise, especially then. Respecting Hunt’s privacy in the relationship despite noticing the tiniest shifts in his body language after a ‘work trip’ to Houston, she tries to hold on to her fairytale by not outright confronting him about his double life.The instalment also boasts of one of the most dynamic supporting casts in the franchise: introducing Simon Pegg’s Benji, who delivers one of the film’s most quotable lines—referring to nuclear world-ending weapons as the ‘Anti-God’. Apart from Ving Rhames’s Luther, the cast also features the likes of Jonathan Rhys Meyers (one of the hottest actors in America after Match Point, 2005), Maggie Q, Billy Crudup, Keri Russell and Laurence Fishburne. I’ll never forget Fishburne playing a brute patriot delivering a cheesy line like, “I’ll bleed on the American flag to keep the stripes red” with a straight face.  

Hoffman—only briefly in the film with an arguably abrupt death—delivers a masterclass in playing the archetype villain carrying armageddon in his suitcase. In a sensational sequence, Abrams cuts briskly between Cruise and Hoffman’s lines—both framed in classic De Palma close-ups—having two entirely disconnected conversations between themselves:  

Hunt: “What’s the rabbit’s foot?”/ Davian: “What’s your name?” 

Hunt: “Who do you work for?”/ Davian: “Do you have a girlfriend? Someone you love?” 

Hunt: “Who is your buyer?” / Davian: “I’m going to find her, and I’m going to hurt her.” 

It helps that Abrams doesn’t have a defined directorial style in the film, as he’s able to improvise between Spielberg’s vision for big-screen set-pieces, the visceral action of the Bourne films, the stylish slo-mo of John Woo, and the high-decibel explosions of a generic Hollywood blockbuster. Hoisted around the film’s three action set-pieces—the Berlin mission, the Vatican mission and the mission in Shanghai—M:I III not only manages to be consistently exhilarating but becomes almost too competent for its own good.  

The final 20 minutes, after the Shanghai mission, is when it all falls apart. Davian, built up as this ghost (believe it or not), gets run over by a tempo in a seedy bylane in Shanghai—almost like Abrams found out that was Hoffman’s last day on set, so he quickly devised this ‘exit’. Hunt, with an explosive charge in his head, fights using his elbows. It’s a testament to Cruise’s sheer wattage as a star that he makes even something as ridiculous as this seem feasible. He electrocutes himself and is then revived by Julia’s punches to his chest, which would ideally break his ribcage if done correctly.  

However, the convenience of the last 20 minutes doesn’t do much to wash away the high-octane 100 minutes before this. M:I III might not very often be a part of pop-culture conversation, but the rest of the films in the franchise owe a huge debt to it. If not for Hoffman playing Davian, we might never have seen someone like Sean Harris being cast as the antagonist in Rogue Nation (2015). We might not have the gift of Benji. And we might never have known that Ethan Hunt has a beating heart, even after it momentarily stops.  

Standing far away in a party, as Ethan listens to Julie’s conversation with her girlfriends by reading their lips, he politely butts in at the right moment with, “Lake Wanaka!” And this is exactly what makes M:I III such a charmer.