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movienotesbyzawmer · 3 years

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August 26: Mission: Impossible III

(previous notes: Mission: Impossible II)

Another one I haven't seen since it first came out (fifteen years ago!), but I remember liking it. Other than the exciting new personnel in the cast and in the director's chair, I really can't remember any details about this.

The director is, of course, J.J. Abrams. He comes in scalding hot from his television work, most notably Lost, and is making his feature directorial debut here before eventually directing what is currently the top-grossing movie of all time in the US. There was reason at the time to expect an improvement over the spotty second entry, but what does it say that I can't remember anything at all… okay let's start it.

You know how movies often love to tease the audience by opening with a really really exciting scene that's supposed to blow your mind and make you go OH my GOD like HOW did we GET to this VERY EXCITING SITUATION and then they jerk it all away and start from the beginning, this movie begins with that. That and very "modern" shaky shaky handheld camera stuff. I don't like that handheld stuff but whatever.

After the credits it's clearly back to before-problem. Ethan is having a chill dinner party with his girlfriend who is not Thandie Newton but who is definitely being tortured by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the opening tease.

That is subtly interrupted by a covert request to meet at a convenience store for some espionage and, perhaps less subtly, a lot of exposition. Very unnatural dialogue lets us know that Ethan is not in the field any more, he is a trainer, but one of his trainees is in trouble with PSH and will he help please. Also that was his fiancée not his mere girlfriend. That is a much more elite status. High stakes OMG.

Off to Berlin, and I'm reminded that the previous movie didn't do as much globetrotting; it was pretty much in Australia the whole time. I like location diversity.

The rescue of the played-by-Keri-Russell former protégé is not a stealthy one. They plant a bunch of blowy-uppy things around the rusty warehouse where they're torturing her and cause chaos to help them get to her and shoot their way out. There is no mask-craft so far.

After a cocky moment where Ethan demonstrates that being down to only one bullet was just fine with him, there's a cool shot where a closeup of Ethan has a nicely-framed surprise explosion behind him.

Much splody. So much splody. Maybe M:I3 is the one that should be remembered as The Splody One. There are rockets toppling wind turbines being negotiated by chasing helicopters. But the most suspenseful issue is that KR has a secret surprise blowy-uppy in her bloodstream. A race to maybe do something about it doesn't work and she dies. I remember predicting her death to my friends before the movie started, but it didn't make those friends like me any better.

Worth noting that J.J. Abrams is not wrong to apparently think we will think all the wind turbine imagery will look pretty neat.

Before dying, KR sent a postcard to Ethan, and not even in a normal way, in a "Hi is this Rollo Tamassy? I was given explicit instructions to let you know there is a delivery for you in dead Keri Russell's mailbox" kind of weird way. The postcard had a blank microdot hidden under the stamp. Feels slightly eye-rolly. Simon Pegg is now in the movie now, though, so that's cool.

Ethan had to have a serious talk with Julia about how serious his life is or something, and they get married like right there in a storage room! Then Ethan and the team go to the Vatican and do a heist there. It's an okay heist that involves seeming like bickering Italian van drivers and then changing into different costumes. No masks though. They still look like themselves. J.J. Abrams clearly told people, "why should I watch the other Mission Impossible movies when I literally made Alias".

They shoot magic sticky pebbles near cameras to make them not work, this is important to their method, but I'm not sure how this is supposed to end, aren't they kidnapping PSH or something?

0:47:57 - Welly welly well, what have we here, they have the mask machine! We actually see it 3D-print a PSH mask, now we talkin

Ooh, and we also get to see a whole thing about the voice disguise technology, Ethan has a PSH mask on and he forces the real PSH at gunpoint to say a script to teach the tech thing his voice, but it's not ready in time when he has to say stuff in disguise and there is suspense there, I like it!

They successfully completed the heist of stealing PSH from the Vatican, even though we didn't see exactly how they transported his sedated body out of there but okay

"Whoever it is I'm gonna find her and I'm gonna hurt her", we're seeing PSH be a villain on a level that one really doesn't see very much.

Ethan responds to that by doing an odd thing that I guess would be described as "dangling him from the bottom of a plane that is flying up in the air and therefore scary". He's trying to figure out what "rabbit's foot" is, which we heard about in the opening tease. We still don't know what it is. I've known for fifteen years apparently and even I don't know what it is so

The next exotic location on our tour appears to be the bridges connecting the Florida Keys, and things get splody again! Rocket bombs destroy the bridges they're on plus also some of the vehicles that are around. Right before that happened we saw the secret video message that KR had hidden in that microdot pre-her-unfortunate-death, and it was the news that the spy executive we've seen a couple of times, played by Lawrence Fishburne, is secretly a bad guy. So the rocket-equipped military force that is recklessly decimating bridges and automobiles is probably under Spy Executive's direction. Kind of rash doing all this destruction.

Oh, I remember that shot! Ethan is running away from a car that is the victim of a rocketplosion, and the force of that throws him in a way you don't see very much, it was probably hard to make it look that good. There are other cool shots in this sequence too.

Oh I like this I like this… the bad guys that are under the direction of Spy Executive have apprehended Ethan just after he found out that PSH kidnapped Julia. He has 48 hours to do a "rabbit's foot" something for PSH in order to save Julia, but he's all restrained and has a strange mask on, but what I like is that Billy Crudup, who is Spy Executive's lackey, did a trick that required Ethan to read his lips. BC knows what's up and is helping Ethan, it's exciting.

1:21:53 - Ethan has escaped and met up with his crew (hey, we have hardly even seen Simon Pegg, what is up with that), and they're doing a heist plan, and it involves drawing skyscrapers on glass and the camera angle matches the actual skyscrapers and it's pretty cool especially when he's doing geometry and actual mathematic calculations to plan some kind of corporeal transfer between two skyscrapers.

That scene is followed by a very impossible-looking shot of Ethan on top of a Shanghai skyscraper; it zooms in from way far away and then circles him and stays on him having a conversation with Ving Rhames, all one shot.

Then a very exciting sequence, the one that was planned for so academically before; Ethan does a super crazy run off the top of the building, and the bungee thing he's attached to does cool looking stuff to get him to swing to the actual building that is his destination, but it's on a sloping thing and he slides down it and there are bad guys he has to shoot. His job is challenging.

I keep forgetting to note this but I do keep observing with satisfaction that the score is all orchestral and traditional, none of the neo-slickrawk of the last two.

Things happened so fast that I didn't quite comprehend how all of his leaps and swings resulted in him obtaining the "rabbits foot", but I guess the thing that looks like a cartridge-container for a pneumatic tube conveyer that has a thing with a radioactivity symbol on it is that. What even is.

The meeting to do the exchange of Julia & "rabbit's foot" is set up and pretty quickly we're caught up to the tease from the beginning. We now are enjoyably frustrated that Ethan thinks he gave them the "rabbit's foot" but dude is asking for it and it's like wut dood I gave it? That ends with PSH seemingly shooting Julia and BC showing up and clearly being in cahoots with the bad guys after all. And it was a fake Julia in a masky-mask, the real one is still okay somewhere. Masked-and-now-dead woman is someone we saw as PSH's translator at the Vatican and the expository dialogue that helps us know this is so artificial-seeming that it reminds us that elaborating on who that really was is kind of pointless and laborious.

This long monologue by BC, mixed too quiet again, also tries to explain his point of view, but I can't quite get it. He says something about the "rabbit's foot", are we supposed to know what it is yet? He mumbled something about a "middle eastern buyer".

1:44:45 - Somehow Ethan was able to get Simon Pegg on the phone after biting his way away from BC (SHHH NO TIME TO EXPLAIN), and then he gets to the top of a suburban Shanghai house and a shot is really cool showing that and it moves and follows him in a cool way, and then the subsequent shots of him running through the streets are cool, he's on the phone with SP who is telling him exactly which little city streets to turn into.

Just as he has found Julia and is maybe going to rescue her, he gets a big headache and we remember that he has the same mini-splody in him that killed KR, and PSH shows up, pretty bad news. PSH delivers his threatening dialogue in a vividly psychopathic way.

PSH's end is dumb, especially on paper. He turns is back on Ethan, who is easily able to jump him and fight him. The fight spills out into the street and a lucky car accident seems to fatally maim PSH while leaving Ethan unharmed. Meh.

The final resolution involves trying the idea they had at the beginning that didn't work with KR, where some kind of on-purpose electrocution death preludes the micro-splody death and then you just have to be good at reviving the person. And it almost doesn't work… but then it does oh my god it does

There is a very very pleasant shot of Ethan and Julia strolling through a Chinese village with a canal bridge and it really is nice looking and I want to go there and stroll like they are strolling.

But then they're back at HQ or whatever and oh, I guess it turns out BC was the only secret bad guy and Spy Executive was good enough and they're all on good terms and Ethan and Julia go on a honeymoon the end. Oh, and the final exchange cheekily reveals that we will never know what "rabbit's foot" was. Creative? Cop-out? Who's to say? (insert why-not-both gif)

So what's to remember about that movie? Was it indeed better than MI:2? I guess a little; there are several little annoying things from both of the first two movies that are absent here, so that's refreshing… but also some of the plot contrivances don't improve on what we've seen so far. Some very very very ambitious visuals! That's the real thing I want to make sure not to forget about this. The previous one had John Woo's signature visual style, but none of it matches the accomplishments of the cool shots in this one. I might have preferred a little more playfulness with the espionage stuff, but if I recall correctly the series doesn't really return to that form.

(next: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol)

#Mission: Impossible 3 #M:I3

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