Movie Review: Mission Impossible 3 - Stormtroopers of the International Monetary Fund

Last Friday, in celebration of getting hired by our very government, I went to see a movie my wife would have no interest in seeing, Mission Impossible 3. Being the third installment of the MI franchise, we should expect a let down, because the third one usually is the start of the badness. It's the place where we get a new director, or new writers, or replace the star, or do something to go horribly awry. Let's take a look at third installments of franchises before we get to MI3.

The greatest movie and sequel ever was the Godfather, parts one and two. Part two is the only sequel to win the Oscar for Best Picture, so I think I stand on pretty solid ground. Part Three is the movie that most fans of the series pretend never happened.

Batman. The third installment was the first of Joel Schumacher's two, the one with Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones as the villians and the one that brought Robin into the franchise. It also brought a goofy, nearly baroque batmobile and had a gaudy color palette that was the antithesis of the Batman rennovation taken up by Frank Miller in the comics and Tim Burton in the movies. I'm not saying the second Batman was great, but compared to three, it was Oscar material.

Return of the Jedi brought us gibberish speaking teddy bears and the dopey the good side of his evil side discussion. Oh yeah, and Luke and Leia are twins, so all the kissing in the previous two movies is suddenly something out of rural Missouri.

Rocky Three had Mr. T and Hulk Hogan. Really. I'm not saying it's a bad flick (it's not) but the original was an Oscar caliber movie. I think this is the only place where The Academy can be mentioned in the same paragraph as either Mr. T or Terry Hogan. Superman 3 had Richard Prior. While that's usually a good thing, it's not when he's the villian. The Matrix 3 made no sense at all, even on my third viewing of it. While the second wasn't as good as the first (which was overrated), it did have the freeway sequence and the Marovingian. In fact, when I think on it, the only part 3 that was actually better than a part 2 was the Lord of the Rings (it was long and slow, just like the others, but at least some stuff happens all the way through. Even though it ended like twelve times). I think Star Trek 3 was good too. Maybe. That's the Search for Spock one. Not better than Wrath of Khan, but infinitely better than #4, the quest to save the whales.

So, with that history in mind, and the fact that MI2 was something of a mess, I expected MI3 to suck. In that regard, I was dissappointed. It's a pretty good flick. At their core, the two good MI films are really just a series of heist movies with some semblance of a central plot. If you can follow the central plot, that's just bonus. But they are not the same as James Bond flicks when they are good, because it's more about the planning and execution of an impossible heist. The most memorable scene from the first was the one where Crazy Tom Cruise hangs two inches from the floor and can't drop a bead of sweat because it will set off every alarm in North America. Minor Icon that scene. So, where #2 went astray (I'm a big John Woo fan, particularly of his Hong Kong work, but his strengths are not the strengths of the M:I series) was that it focused on action, not on the planning and execution of the impossible, or even the improbable. That's what the original show was about and the best parts of the original movie. That is precisely where M:I3 goes right. The story about Tom Cruise retiring and getting married to a civilian, that's nice and all, but really, we want the Impossible. People get married every day. They retire from their jobs too.

Our first heist is the recovery of a lost agent, a girl that Crazy Tom Cruise trained. In fact, she's his first. So, he gets pulled back into the action fold to pull her out of some hole in Germany. For our mission, Ving is back on the computers (the chemistry between Ving and Crazy Tom is great. Sometimes you forget that Tom Cruise is actually more than a crazy scientologist with a pretty face who stars in a lot of sci-fi movies lately), and we now have Maggie Q and Johnathan Rhys Meyers along for the ride. They pull the heist, tautly, shooting a bunch of folks who were undoubtedly deserving, but as their getting away, they discover that their rescue target has a small explosive charge in her head, that they are unable to defuse in time. She dies, with her left eye all queer to the camera.

I have a question here for the villian who put the charge there. He put something like a four minute delay on the thing. Why would you do that? If I'm the villain, with millions of dollars and all the resources necessary to put explosive charges in people's heads, I want to press a button and have it go off. Point, click, boom, dead. Just like that. If I have that, there's no possible outside shot of them survivng, unless they hermetically seal themselves in a lead box. But if they do that, you've pretty much won because they're off the board anyway. The four minute delay is weak weak weak. Granted, this is not your "mutated sea bass behind a closed door with one incompetant guard watching" death trap, but it leaves a hole and real evil masterminds don't leave you a hole. Hell, I wouldn't, and I'm hardly smart enough to raise the capital to rule the world, much less actually rule it.

Back to the movie. So, Tom and his boss get raked over the coals for basically getting nothing out of the mission. In fact, they got less than nothing, because the girl had a lot of information on Phillip Seymour Hoffman, international arms dealer, smarmy wise ass, and cold hearted snake all rolled into one. Since PSH is a big pain in Crazy Tom's boss's ass, Crazy Tom decides to run a clandestine kidnapping in Vatican City. His team is in and the plan is hatched. They managed to snatch PSH by the skin of their teeth. Oh yeah, they have to snatch him without anyone noticing, because it will muck things up. They manage to do it and then fake his death, ostensibly so no one will come looking for him. Ihe heist itself is a remarkably slick piece of operation that made me glad to have gone.

When, inevitably, the baddies spring PSH, blowing up a bridge and killing pretty wantonly to do so, it's revealed that Crazy Tom and Co work for the IMF. My jaw drops. I mean, I know people feel the IMF strong arms foreign countries into taking predatory loans, but I had no idea the International Monetary Fund has stormtroopers and commandos to carry out it's globalization missions. On the flip side, I feel a lot better that it's not my tax dollar that's going to support this reckless cowboy agency. It's later revealed that the agency is really the Impossible Mission Force, which is a junky acronym and a crappy agency title. Why can't they just be from the Operations Branch of the CIA like real people. They can be part of a special operations unit, but give it a more real sounding name. Sigh.

In the wake of PSH getting loose, he also kidnaps Crazy Tom's wife. Crazy Tom does what Crazy Toms do, which is go crazy. His bosses lock him down, deep in their headquarters under the Virginia Department of Transportation. He gets sprung, giving a nice parrallel to PSH's character, though the contrast is important. PSH needs people to spring him. Crazy Tom just needs a little razor blade to cut his bonds and a destination to flee to. In a very amusing sequence, he does just that, leaving the emergency channel of the IMF tuned to some disco station. Very funny. We're out and it's off to Shanghai. Yeah!

In Shanghai, we have something like three hours to steal something from some Chinese company. We set up a fulcrum, swinging around the highrises of Shanghai. We execute a base jump from a very low height to escape. This heist is interesting because they show a little bit of the planning and then let it unfold. They show Crazy Tom getting into the building. We develop the other chracters for a minute or two (I dunno what the point is. The only recurring characters in the series are Crazy Tom and Ving. Everyone else is just meat and window dressing). Then Crazy Tom comes flying out of the building and his jump isn't going well. It's kind of a testament to hasty planning and desperate measures. More than any of the others, this mission is impossible. The other movies covered improbable missions, but planning and executing this last heist in the time alloted, with the resources available, is beyond improbable. It's impossible. Not unpossible (the word reserved for the truly impossible. In this age of "Impossible is Nothing," we need a harder limit. I propose unpossible. Take the Mike Metzger backflip over the Caeser's fountains. Clearly, it's possible, but we like to think he did the impossible, so we call it the impossible jump. Giving to convention, what he did was impossible. But jumping them the long way, that's unpossible.), but impossible.

After that, the movie devolves into a good guy gets the bad guy before the bad guy gets him and his wife. It's fast moving, even when Crazy Tom has to kill himself and be brought back with CPR to avoid being killed by that four minute delayed explosive charge in his head. I bet the baddy, while laying there, dying, rethought the wisdom of a four minute delay on the brain bomb. After Tom comes back from the dead (he's like Jesus that way and good thing his wife is a nurse), the movie pretty much ends with Tom non-committal about staying on with the IMF. Maybe he's gonna jump ship and work for the Federal Reserve Bank. Or the World Bank. I hear they could use some good stormtroopers.