Watched: Mission Impossible: III (2006).
In the five years between this and the film’s predecessor, a few things have changed: MI:3, for all its flaws (and it has a few), feels considerably more coherent. There’s an arc here, rather than a simple escalation, and while it’s one that involves the death of one major female character and the kidnapping of another, it is at least something.
Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is beckoned out of retirement at the start of this one - at some point in the last five years he’s managed to get engaged and settle down, without much explanation as to how the hell that happened - and from there the film largely follows the similar setup of a charismatic villain (here, in the series’ best so far, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), chased across the globe, with one or two MacGuffins thrown in the mix. The only key difference here is that there are some elements of narrative subversion that don’t just rely on convincing face masks - in fact, one of the subversions comes from being given the foreknowledge to know exactly what’s going on when Philip Seymour Hoffman runs into Philip Seymour Hoffman in a public bathroom, rather than guessing identities.
The narrative twists and turns largely work, and genuinely did surprise me (though maybe I was just gullible, or excited to see Simon Pegg in a blockbuster). Philip Seymour Hoffman is incredible, and Tom Cruise gets to flash his winning, terrifying smile at least a handful of times. I just wish they hadn’t damseled Michelle Monaghan. She deserved better.