 When I first started thinking of Mission 3, I wanted more from the character in the story. You know, we talked about bringing the team together and having that whole, you know, field picture and wanting it to have a romantic quality but a toughness and have it be a love story. I got this phone call and it was my agent and he said, are you aware of the discussions about you directing Mission Impossible 3? I said, what? I was working on Mission Impossible and I was up about two in the morning one night and I just, I'm going to watch Alias. I just started watching Alias. It was blown away by what he accomplished. His sense of timing, suspense. I thought, you know what? I want JJ Abrams to direct the movie. So in 2006, the Mission Impossible franchise continued with their third installment and once again with a different director at the helm. And I made it no secret in the previous review that I felt John Woo was an horrendously miscached choice for the second movie. So I'm definitely not complaining they once again went with someone else. JJ Abrams nowadays of course is probably best known for directing and producing the latest Star Wars trilogy as well as producing Star Trek Beyond. But I guess I knew his name best as being the producer of 2008's Cloverfield. Frilling movie. Two years before all that though, he got his directorial debut right here in the movie we're looking at today. Mission Impossible 3. I remember vividly that the years between Mission Impossible 2 and 3 were the years I started to warm to Tom Cruise a lot more. I think a lot of that had to do with his amazing performance in 2004's Collateral directed by Michael Mann. Cruise portrayed a villain here for once. The insanely badass yet likeable, clever assassin Vincent. Which to me was a major turning point because boy did he kick ass in this. It's still one of my all time favorite performances that he did much like the movie itself, which aids like a fine wine. It was a huge contrast to the snarky long haired playboy type Ethan Hunt that was way too full of himself that he portrayed in Mission Impossible 2. We've put an explosive charge in your head. Does that sound familiar? All of that is gone as is immediately present in the more gritty and serious tone the movie sets up right from the get go in one of the most intriguing openings to start a film with. We jump right into a flash forward. Ethan is strapped to a chair with the villain holding a chick who's clearly important to him at gunpoint while counting the ten. Philip Seamer Hoffman plays the villain and we instantly realize that this guy won't be messing around in this movie. It's very suspenseful. Cruise and Hoffman are very good in this. We have no clue yet how Ethan ended up here, who the woman is in relation to Ethan, what the villain is talking about, but it's the perfect way to set up intrigue and immediately get you invested in the movie in a very powerful way. But we do learn we will once again be dealing with a McGuffin in this movie. The first Mission Impossible movie had the knock list. The second had Chimera and Beleraphon. Yes, Beleraphon, as you guys in the comments systematically pointed out with your smart ass, it's Beleraphon, not Beleravon. Gotta love running a YouTube channel. Love you guys. So this time we're dealing with the rabbit's foot as a plot device. It holds no significance to us, but we do know the bad guy is after it. No. Done. Just like that we're launched into the third Mission Impossible. No more crazy Limbisket Metal Mission Impossible theme, no overly-flashy slow motion shots, but to return to the classic Mission Impossible theme and playing brilliant filmmaking. Honestly, this four-minute opening alone is more compelling and able to put you on the edge of your seat and hold your attention than pretty much the entirety of Mission Impossible 2 was ever able to do. We're off to a good start. So at the start of the movie we see that Ethan is living together with the woman who will end up getting that gun to her head later on. The love of his life, Julia, played by Michelle Monaghan. Immediately I wonder what happened to Naya, who Ethan seemed pretty in love with in the previous movie as well, with them setting off romantically in the sunset together. Actually, let me check. Why didn't Naya return in Mission Impossible 3? Hmm. So apparently Fandy Newton said that she won't return to film Mission Impossible 3 in order to focus on her family. Had she returned in the third film, she would be a highly-trained agent of the IMF and part of the team in 2006. Huh. Such a shame that that didn't happen though. She's definitely one of the only highlights to Mission Impossible 2. Oh well, Julia and Ethan are having an engagement party. It's clear that these two love each other and are having a relatively normal life. I also liked this moment, showcasing the common perception of Tom Cruise to men and women very accurately. His traffic has a memory. It's amazing. It's like a living organism. Fresh enough for you? Was it Baca Martina? Yeah. I'd marry him. Anyway, so Ethan is a retired IMF agent at the start of this movie. He's now only training recruits to become actual agents. Julia does not know this about him, which I guess is another reason they didn't bring back Naya as the love of his life because she does know about Ethan's real life. In retrospect, it seems kind of odd that Ethan is already retired in this movie. You know, knowing that there are a lot more Mission Impossible movies that came out after this, but at the time it had been 10 years since the first Mission Impossible movie after all. It's not that weird to be retired. But besides being a former IMF agent, there doesn't seem to be any connection or continuity to the previous two movies again. It's a completely different story. You could just hop in in Part 3 and not miss anything. Despite being retired, the IMF makes it no secret that they desperately want Ethan back in the field and tried to bring him in on a mission to rescue one of Ethan's protochets, Lindsay, who was captured. Ethan initially refuses, but does get tantalized to at the very least listen to the mission briefing anyway hidden in a camera that the IMF guy Musgrave left behind for him. We learn that Lindsay was investigating our main villain played by Philip Seymour Hoffman that we saw in the flash-forward opening that the movie is leading up to. We learn that his name is Owen Davion, an extremely dangerous black market arms dealer. An IMF team is already assembled for the rescue mission. A guy named Declan, an Asian agent Zen Lee who I guess is the replacement to what would have been Nia's role and good ol' Lufer once again returning. So the rescue mission takes place in Berlin. Ethan just tells his fiance he needs to go to Houston for a night or something. The mission itself is pretty classic Mission Impossible. Lots of high-tech equipment, Lufer guiding Ethan through the field while disapproving of Ethan getting a fiance, and plenty of explosions. Oh and as a Bond fan, Zen Lee also totally reminds me of Wei Lin in that outfit with the same gun and stuff. Very similar. So Ethan manages to retrieve Lindsay, who apparently is suffering from a huge headache because of a micro-explosive charge planted in her head. Does that sound familiar? Something we know will happen to Ethan later on as foreshadowed in the flash-forward opening. So Ethan tries to save her with a defibrillator all while being in the middle of a helicopter chase with rockets being fired at them in a huge windmill park. It's a very thrilling action scene. The bad guys end up crashing into one of the windmills though for no real reason. Why not just fly over or under the windmills? Anyway, just before Ethan is able to zap Lindsay, her charge gets activated and she immediately turns into an unsettling lifeless face. So despite being able to save her, the team efforts were kind of for nothing. He gets directly scolded for that by his IMF superior played fiercely by Lawrence Fishburne. Wait, wasn't that guy played by Anthony Hopkins, Ethan's superior? Oh no, wait, Hopkins was the IMF commander. Fishburne placed the IMF director. Totally different. Wait a minute, wasn't Kid Rich the IMF director? Guess he got replaced. So it's clear that Lindsay was important to Ethan as he attends her funeral and gets flashbacks of training her and stuff. She left him a micro-dot on a postcard containing a secret message which Luthor and Ethan can't decode yet. We're also introduced to the IMF tech guy, Benji, played by Simon Beck who is a wonderful comic relief to the film. I used to have this professor at Oxford, okay, Dr. Wickham. His name was seems like this massive fat guy, you know, a huge big guy. We used to call him, you know, but I won't tell you we used to call him. He taught biomolecular kinetics. Benji would rightfully go on to be part of the main characters in future installments and get much more screen time. Through one of the broken laptops or three from the rescue mission in Germany, Benji discovered that Davion is going to be at the Vatican. In talks for, there's our regoven, the rabbit's foot. So Ethan being Ethan wants to go after Davion at the Vatican. Before that happens though, Ethan and Julia share an emotional moment in which Ethan tells her again that he needs to leave for a few days, unable to reveal his IMF background to her, causing a lot of confusion between the two. The pair is really good. The vulnerability somehow grounds Ethan much more in reality than in any of the smug overly confident portrayals of the past films, which makes his character more three-dimensional and likeable. The pair end up having an impromptu wedding at the hospital before Ethan leaves. It's very different to anything we've seen before in the series. Quite emotional. Of course it's followed by some mandatory honeymoon hospital banging as you do. In more classic Mission Impossible style though, the team's mission is set up to be impossible, breaking into the heavily secured Vatican to kidnap Davion, without Davion's buyers finding out that he is kidnapped. How does the team start this impossible job? Well, by having an Italian argument in the middle of the streets of Rome, of course. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of this. With that diversion set in place, Ethan quickly disables the camera and sneaks over the Vatican's wall. And at this point it really seems to have become mandatory to have Tom Cruise hang an inch above the ground in each of these films. Almost in Bond fashion, he disposes of his career outfit to reveal completely different clothes in the form of a priest. It's pretty fun. What follows is typical Mission Impossible stuff though. A team of professionals executing a plan, placing tracers hacking into computers, disabling security cameras, putting on multiple disguises. It's all a joy to watch. Zen Lee also gets a moment to shine, driving a Lamborghini posing as a rich chick in a glamorous dress. She looks good. She gets to take pictures of their target Davion so they can create a mask of his face. It's the first time in the film series we actually get to see how they create these signature masks. Cruise gets to put on a Philip Seymour Hoffman costume basically and gains like 20 kilos in a single shot. Using a Davion mask, Ethan surprises the real Davion, forces him to read a card to collect his voice data and triangleizes him. There's a tiny moment of a translator translating between Ethan in the Davion costume, flirting with Zen Lee, which seems like a seemingly uninteresting moment, but it comes back later. Through some Mission Impossible-ness, they manage to kidnap the real Davion through the sewers while Ethan and Zen Lee make their way out of the Lamborghini undetected, blowing the beautiful car up, making it seem Davion was killed and escaping in a stylish way on a boat in Rome, which I think was the first shot they filmed for the movie by the way. This whole Vatican sequence is a lot of fun, filled with a good combination of humor between the characters as well as suspense that keeps you locked to the screen. What follows is one of the most memorable sequences in this movie, Ethan questioning Davion in the airplane and Davion just completely ignoring the questions and having none of it. Hoffman is really good in this and to me probably is the best and most memorable villain this franchise ever saw. He's very unsettlingly at ease, telling Ethan he will track his wife down and hurt her, which we know from the foreshadowed opening will happen. At the moment Ethan snaps with Davion getting under his skin is really something else compared to the cool and in control Ethan we saw so far in the previous films. He's much more a flawed and interesting character in this movie. Even with Davion hanging out of the airplane he's not having any of it and we learn nothing about the rabbit's foot. All it does is louver shouting Ethan's name, which we as the audience already know is a mistake that's going to come back and bite him later. What we're selling to is the last thing you should be concerned about, Ethan. Back in the US we get a sequence that immediately reminded me of License to Kill. Even the first time I saw this movie, Davion is in custody and from the location alone and the similarity with San Jazz's custody escape on a very similar location, I was totally expecting Davion here to be rescued out of custody in the same fashion. How do we get to that though? Remember Lindsay's micro dot that they couldn't decode earlier on? Well, they manage to do it now and we learn that Davion is supposedly in cahoots with Ethan's new IMF superior played by Laurence Fishburne. It's quite a shocking interesting twist that we don't have time to think about. Instead of the secured fan being bumped into the water extracting the villain like in License to Kill they do it differently with half of the bridge being blown up with a high-speed drone firing rockets assisted by a helicopter with a group of mercenaries. This also has one of the signature stunts of the film with Ethan flying into the car because of the explosion. It's pretty cool. It's a lot better than the jump across the hole in the bridge which seems really inconsistent to me. In one shot the gap looks like it could be a couple of car lengths long and in the next Ethan seems to have jumped over a tiny gap. Overall though, it's another exhilarating sequence. So like Bond fans can all guess beforehand Davion indeed gets extracted leaving Ethan unsuccessful with that cold expression on Davion's face now knowing his name. Ethan realizes his wife is in big trouble so even quickly rushes over to her work at the hospital desperately trying to prevent Julia from being kidnapped. Again, this is why the foreshadowing opening works so well. The movie is slowly leading up to that moment. We all know that it's coming. You have 48 hours starting at my mark. Call me at this number when you have it. Just wait. Julia's life for the rest of it. You have 48 hours where she dies. Wait! It's all catching up to him. And to make things worse, the IMF brings Ethan in. Not that we learned that Davion is in cahoots with Laurence Fispern. They keep Ethan in custody which isn't exactly helpful within that 48 hours he has left to get the rabbit's foot to save his wife's life and he doesn't even know what it is yet. But then Fispern's assistant must grave mouse to Ethan where he needs to go. Luckily, Ethan is an expert lib reader something we cleverly saw foreshadowed at the engagement party at the start of the film. Of course, Ethan makes a clever escape impersonating Fispern's voice which he's really good at. A couple of scenes ago he was desperately waiting for Davion's voice to get uploaded and now he's just impersonating the IMF director's voice with ease without a voice-altering device. Kinda weird. The escape is pretty amusing though. So Ethan proceeds to Shanghai to try and steal the rabbit's foot to save his wife's life. Fortunately, his crew is there to help. Ethan does some quick elaborate planning for a signature impossible scheme and before we know it, Cruz is doing more ridiculous stunts by himself as he does and makes his way onto the correct building. The heists are always a signature part of the Mission Impossible films. This time however, the filmmakers make the choice not to show the actual heist inside of the building itself which I guess you could claim is disappointing but then again, I think it's because they want to leave it to the imagination as to what the rabbit's foot is. You see, it's a McGovern and it doesn't really matter in terms of the story. We just know that it's important and that Ethan has to go get it to save the life of his wife. It keeps the pace of the movie going too and it's not like we're not getting any action. Besides, we've also had a heist like scene already at the Vatican. So instead, we just get Ethan crashing out through a window with the rabbit's foot and another car chase escape to the security of the building. Eventually, he gets to the meeting point and finally, after one hour and 36 minutes we're back at the foreshadowed moment the movie started with. No. Ten. No! And just like that, Julia gets killed right before his eyes. Or so he thinks, it's actually Davion's translator from back at the Vatican and Musgrave turns out to be the real guy in Cahoots with Davion, not Fitzburn's character. So Julia is in fact still alive but is being taken hostage at another location. Ethan makes an escape and calls the tech guy, Benji, to lead him to the last made call on Musgrave's phone so that he can be led to her location. We get some nice comic relief from Benji again which in retrospect kind of feels like the origins of the fun and more prominent character he is to become in the future installments. So Cruz gets to do some signature running in another memorable moment of the film as he sprints three quarters of a mile pretty much in one take. I guess it's alright, I mean it's just Cruz running. A lot. You can't really question his stamina though but it's filmed in a pretty interesting way. Had this been John Woo returning to direct again though, I bet the sequence would have looked a lot more like this. Thank heavens it's not like that. So Ethan reaches Julia in the building but just as he gets to her the explosive charge planted in his head is activated and as we know from Lindsay in the beginning of the film that does not end well. Davion shows up again being his usual creepy self. Again, Hoffman is just superb in this role. I honestly think he would have made a great bond villain as well. And Ethan is left helpless because of the charge. Cruz and Hoffman just really sell it all. The fighting ends with Davion meaning his doom to an unsuspecting car at the road. Well, Ethan quickly instructs his wife who has no idea what the hell is going on, how to use a gun and to give him a jolt in order to take out the explosive charge in his head. Essentially killing him, fully trusting she can bring him back with CPR. It all comes to a dramatic end with Julia killing Musgrave in her panic who has the rabbit's foot. Cue in a pretty emotional moment of Julia desperately trying to bring her husband back to life. Come on baby, I need you to come back. It's a well executed and emotional ending. So now Ethan is finally able to let his wife know about his true identity. And the rabbit's foot? Well... Hey, one thing. The rabbit's foot. What is it? Promise me you'll stay, I'll tell you. Again, it's just meant to remain nothing. Your own imagination. A plot device used well to tell a cool action packed love story. As we get Ethan and Julia, who now met the IMF team to leave onto their honeymoon as the movie comes to an end. So, Mission Impossible 3. In my opinion a huge step up from the previous movie and in my opinion the strongest one out of the original trilogy. The first one was a very decent action packed spy thriller. The second one an out of place over the top disappointment. And this one really started to hit the nail in the head and form the franchise into what it was going to become. JJ Abrams gelled much better with the series than John Woo did and although new directors would once again come aboard later on he would end up taking on the role of producer in the future installments of the series alongside Tom Cruise. And you know how Goldfinger started to form a blueprint of what was to become the cinematic Bond series? Here this third installment kinda does that in a similar way. A likable team of IMF agents performing the signature heists. Action packed scenes flowing nicely one after the other. It takes you on a super fast and thrilling ride and doesn't let you go. This is what makes Mission Impossible so fun. If it's done right and Cruise truly found out what works for the character of Ethan Hunt in this film. Because he's no longer a self-important cardboard playboy character and he's a very capable, courageous, secret agent that would stop at nothing to get to his goal. Save others and do the literal impossible. And it's the vulnerability that really makes it all so compelling to watch. Pair that up with the best Mission Impossible villain the series ever saw and you get a really entertaining film with essentially a very simple yet effective and interesting story. As always I like to compare it to the Bond movie of the time which would be Casino Royale which came out in the same year. And you can definitely see a trend making characters more vulnerable and three-dimensional and well human with actual emotions. Making the action scenes more realistic and the fighting a lot grittier. There was definitely a switch going on in these types of movies and perhaps the poor movies might have inspired both of these films in those aspects looking at it in retrospect. I wouldn't say Mission Impossible 3 would beat Casino Royale because well as a Bond fan that one is just something special. But there are very little flaws with Mission Impossible 3 to be honest. It planted the seeds for a formula that seemed to work so that they could potentially benefit from the fruits in the future so that they could perfect it even more. For example the IMF team. Zen Lee was alright and had the potential but didn't have that much of a prominent role. The same holds for Benji in this movie as well as the other team member Declan who honestly was a bit of a forgettable ally I barely mentioned in this review. I mean sure he's there and he gets a little moment talking about Zen Lee's cat in the car in Shanghai but he's forgotten as soon as the credits roll. The same holds for the lack of one major prominent set piece action scene that you immediately think of when you think Mission Impossible 3. Sure you get the explosion on the bridge the jump from the building in Shanghai the running sequence at the river. I don't know but I think it's missing that one prominent thing like the CIA heist scene in the first movie. It's permanently embedded in your memory when you think of that film. Out of the original trilogy though without a doubt I recommend this one the most because it's an action packed thrilling film that grabs your attention right from the get go doesn't let you go for the entire ride. JJ Abrams managed to give the Mission Impossible series an identity of its own and the formula was now left with huge potential for future installments.