J.J. Abrams’s first film is the fastest of the three, with a bridge sequence that had us ducking and, in Philip Seymour Hoffman, a villain who never raises his voice. Underneath, the plot is television, and the object everyone chases is never explained.
J.J. Abrams had never directed a film when Tom Cruise handed him this one. The third Mission: Impossible moves faster than either of its predecessors and has a villain who could frighten a room by clearing his throat. It also has a plot that would not detain a Tuesday-night television audience, built round an object the script refuses to explain. We enjoyed it a great deal.
Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has stepped back from the field to train recruits and is engaged to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), a nurse who believes he works in traffic. At his engagement party Musgrave (Billy Crudup) arrives to say that Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell), Hunt’s protégée, has been taken in Berlin by people working for the arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hunt goes, with Luther (Ving Rhames), Declan (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Zhen (Maggie Q), and the rescue does not go cleanly.
Hoffman is the reason to watch. He plays Davian soft and bored, a heavy man in a good suit who does not raise his voice because he has never needed to. The film opens with him counting to ten over a bound and bleeding Hunt, and we felt something we do not often feel in this series: real fear that he would reach ten. He never plays the villain’s pleasure; he plays a man doing accounts. Cruise looks smaller in every scene they share, and the film uses that.
The action is the other reason. The best is on a bridge over Chesapeake Bay, where a convoy is hit from the air and Hunt, knocked flat by one missile, gets up and runs at the camera while another comes in. Dan Mindel shoots it handheld in hard afternoon light, the sun flaring into the lens and the frame shaking with every impact, and Mary Jo Markey and Maryann Brandon cut it so that we always know where the drone is, where Hunt is, and how far apart they are. We ducked. Michael Giacchino keeps the old Lalo Schifrin theme in the brass and lets it loose only when the running starts. Scott Chambliss builds a Vatican for a heist with a cassock and a mask made in the back of a van, and Colleen Atwood gives Davian the best suits in the film.
The trouble is everything the running is for. The object everyone wants is called the Rabbit’s Foot, and nobody in the film knows what it is. Simon Pegg’s Benji, a lab technician, has a theory involving the end of the world; the script offers it as a joke and then asks us to care about the thing for another hour. We laughed at the joke and then felt slightly cheated, because a thriller that will not say what is at stake has decided the stakes do not matter. The agency politics, Laurence Fishburne’s Brassel barking and Crudup smoothing, run a course anyone who watched Abrams’s Alias will have mapped by the half-hour.
Julia is the film’s attempt at a heart, and Monaghan does what she can with a smile and a hospital corridor. The idea, that Hunt has something to lose this time, is stated at the engagement party, stated again in a lift, and then set aside until the plot needs it. Cruise is at his best sprinting, sweating, hanging from the side of a Shanghai tower on a rope. He is less convincing when asked to stand still and feel things, and Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman write him a good deal of standing still.
Set against the series, this is the one that runs. Brian De Palma’s 1996 film was a puzzle; John Woo’s 2000 sequel was a pose. Abrams makes a chase, which is what the title promised. It runs 126 minutes and carries a 12A. The reasons to see it are Hoffman and the bridge. As for what the Rabbit’s Foot is, nobody knows, and the film has no intention of finding out.
