Mission: Impossible III arrived in 2006 as the third entry in a franchise that had already burned through two directors. J.J. Abrams directed it, his first feature behind the camera. Tom Cruise produced it and stars as Ethan Hunt. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the arms dealer Owen Davian. The film runs 126 minutes.
Trailer, via Paramount Movies.
Two Directors Left Before Abrams Arrived
Development on a third Mission: Impossible began in 2002. David Fincher was set to direct. He left. Joe Carnahan replaced him, then left too. Both cited creative differences, and by 2004 the project had no director at all.
Abrams came aboard later, at Cruise’s request. Cruise was a fan of Abrams’s television work on Alias, which ran from 2001 to 2006. That hire cost the production time. Abrams had contractual obligations to Alias and to Lost, which ran from 2004 to 2010. The delay pushed out prospective cast additions Kenneth Branagh, Carrie-Anne Moss and Scarlett Johansson.
Principal photography finally started in July 2005 and ran until November of that year. The production shot in Shanghai, Berlin, Rome, Los Angeles and Vatican City. That is a long road to a movie that opens with its star already married and retired.
Ethan Hunt Starts Retired, Then Loses Lindsey Farris
The plot wastes no time on the quiet life. Ethan Hunt has left fieldwork. He trains IMF recruits and lives with his fiancée, Julia Meade, a nurse who does not know what his job actually is.
IMF Director of Operations John Musgrave, played by Billy Crudup, pulls him back in. One of Ethan’s protégés, Lindsey Farris, has been captured while investigating Davian. Keri Russell plays Farris. Musgrave has a team ready: Declan Gormley, Zhen Lei and Ethan’s old partner Luther Stickell. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q and Ving Rhames fill those roles.
The team pulls Farris out of Berlin and grabs two damaged laptops on the way. Then the rescue turns. Ethan finds an explosive pellet planted in Farris’s head. He tries to disable it with a defibrillator. It detonates first and kills her.
That death is the engine of the whole film, and it is the best thing in it. It arrives fast, without warning, and it makes Davian real before Hoffman has said a word.
The Vatican Job and the Rabbit’s Foot
Farris mailed Ethan a postcard before she was taken. Under the stamp he finds a magnetic microdot. IMF technician Benji Dunn, played by Simon Pegg, pulls enough data off the laptops to place Davian in Vatican City. Davian is there for a biological hazard codenamed the “Rabbit’s Foot.”
Ethan visits Julia at her hospital. They marry on the spot. Then he plans an unofficial mission to take Davian. The team infiltrates the Vatican and succeeds. They capture him.
The flight home is where Hoffman takes the film. Davian sits through Ethan’s interrogation without flinching, then threatens to kill everyone Ethan cares about. It is a quiet scene and a nasty one, and it works because Hoffman plays it as a man stating a fact.
A Bridge Ambush and 48 Hours
Back on the ground, Ethan learns what the microdot really is: a warning about Davian and about IMF director Theodore Brassel, played by Laurence Fishburne. Then the convoy crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge is hit by mercenaries. They extract Davian.
Ethan realizes Julia is exposed. He races to her hospital and finds she is already gone. Davian calls and gives him 48 hours to hand over the Rabbit’s Foot in exchange for Julia’s life.
Before Ethan can move, the IMF apprehends him and starts asking questions. That is where the film’s second half takes its shape: a man with a clock, a hostage and no agency behind him.
What Abrams Brings and What He Doesn’t
This is Abrams’s feature debut, and it shows in both directions. He directs action with clarity. The Berlin rescue, the Vatican infiltration and the bridge ambush all read cleanly, and the film never loses track of who is where. Coming off Alias and Lost, he knows how to build a sequence around a single piece of information.
What he does not do is give the movie a personality of its own. Mission: Impossible III plays like a very good television pilot with a bigger budget. The set pieces are competent. Few of them are memorable.
The script is credited to Abrams with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, a writing team with a long history in this kind of material. The dialogue is functional. The plot moves. The tagline, “The mission begins,” promises a starting point the film does not really deliver, since the franchise was already ten years old.
Hoffman Is the Reason This One Works
Hoffman is the whole argument for this movie. Davian is not a physical threat. He is a broker of arms and information, and Hoffman plays him as a businessman with no temper and no mercy. The threat he makes on the plane lands harder than any explosion in the film.
Cruise is fine. He is always fine. The problem is that Ethan Hunt’s retirement and marriage exist to be threatened, not to be lived in, and the film gives Michelle Monaghan very little to do as Julia beyond being the thing at stake. Rhames returns as Luther and gets the easy rapport. Pegg shows up as Benji and steals his scenes, which is why the franchise kept him.
The rest of the cast is deep: Crudup, Fishburne, Meyers, Maggie Q, Russell, Eddie Marsan as Brownway, Bahar Soomekh as Davian’s translator. It is a lot of talent in service of a plot that mostly needs them to move pieces around a board.
The Numbers
- Title: Mission: Impossible III (2006)
- Director: J.J. Abrams (feature directorial debut)
- Writers: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, J.J. Abrams
- Runtime: 126 minutes
- Genres: Adventure, Action, Thriller
- Tagline: “The mission begins.”
- Score: 6.6/10 (Metacritic 66/100)
| Time | Set piece |
|---|---|
| Opening | Ethan Hunt retired, training IMF recruits |
| Act one | Berlin rescue of Lindsey Farris; she is killed by an implanted pellet |
| Act two | Microdot recovered; Vatican City infiltration; Davian captured |
| Act two | Return flight; Davian threatens everyone Ethan cares about |
| Act three | Chesapeake Bay Bridge ambush; Davian extracted; Julia kidnapped |
| Act three | Davian gives Ethan 48 hours for the Rabbit’s Foot |
| Act three | IMF apprehends Ethan and questions him |
What the Film Actually Amounts To
Mission: Impossible III is a solid action film with one great performance holding it above average. The production history explains a lot: two directors gone, a third hired late, a start date pushed to July 2005, and a shoot that ran to November across five locations. What came out is a movie that works scene by scene and never quite becomes more than that.
The score is 6.6/10. That is the right number. It is not a bad film and it is not a great one. It is the installment that steadied a franchise without defining it, and it is worth watching for Hoffman, who understood that the scariest man in the room is the one who never raises his voice.
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