TAKE ONE Presents... - The Impossipod 3: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III (2006)

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Simon and Jim get into J. J. Abrams' feature directorial debut, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III, a nadir of the Mission: Impossible franchise. They discuss the ways in which this film is a time capsule of the mid-2000s complete with an ugly digital camera aesthetic and an unpleasantly jingoistic neoconservative worldview, the film's distribution issues related to Scientology, how J. J. Abrams-y and Alex Kurtzman-y the whole film is including a dive into Abrams' patented Mystery Box via the Rabbit's Foot, and how this film, even if largely unsuccessful, sows a lot of seeds for the later shape of the franchise.Content warnings: cult leadership and specific Church of Scientology beliefs; sexual coercion; interrogation and torture; the September 11th terrorist attacks; violent death including murder and assassination; US military interventions and illegal wars; US American slavery.Our theme song is Star - X - Impossible Mission (Mission Impossible Theme PsyTrance Remix) by EDM Non-Stop (https://soundcloud.com/edm-non-stop/star-x-impossible-mission) licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.Full references for this episode available in Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/IPJMNCX2

Your mission should you choose to accept it is to obtain photographic proof, theft, shadow glitzen to his buyer, and apprehend with both. As always, should you or any member of your I am force be caught or kill Secretary of Sabo? Hello and welcome to Take One Presents, The Impossopod. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to listen to us watch all the Mission Impossible franchise films in order, contextualizing them and critiquing them. I'm Simon Bowie, and I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, Jim Ross. Hello, Jim. Hello, hello.

Today, we are watching Mission Impossible Free, the 2006 film directed by J.J. Abrams. This was actually his directorial debut, his feature film, directorial debut, he'd done TV stuff, and written by J.J. Abrams and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orkey. That team feels very mid-2000s. They were very zeitgeister around the mid-2000s, you know, when Lost was dominating the airwaves and fringe had come out. and they were a trendy pair, a trendy, a trendy triplet. But what is your experience with Mission Impossible 3? Have you seen it before? Yep, I was thinking about this, and I think I saw it, it was 2006, I think I saw it in the cinema,

because I wouldn't have been at university at the time, and I don't think I'd watched it again since. Like, I think even Mission Impossible 2, I'd watched at some point between my first viewing and seeing this again. I think I've watched pretty much every one of these films more than once apart from Fallout, the sixth one. I think when I re-watch it, that'll be my first viewing of it since I went to the cinema. But I think genuinely that I hadn't actually watched this one since 2006.

I think this is my first actual re-watch of it. Yeah, I must have seen it earlier than my re-watch a couple of years ago, but I don't remember it, and then I re-watched it a couple of years ago. and hated it. It was the lowest on the ranking I produced then. I really disliked it. It was ugly, it was mean-spirited, it was just grim and boring, and I didn't really remember it. I'm pleased to say on this read-watch, I'm downgrading, upgrading that rather, from the didn't like it to, this is just boring. gone from, yeah, surprisingly decent to, I don't like this film. Yeah, I don't like this film.

That was my experience last time. I still don't like it, but I don't hate it as much. It still does a lot of things I don't like, and we'll get into those as we crack on through it. Well, we'll get into it. I actually think the relationship between this one and the previous film is a good example of why I struggle so much with rankings, because there are so many things that this film does much better than Mission Possible too

which we discussed as many shortcomings in the last episode But it's also a very different piece Yeah, it's a completely different type of movie and then like the last film does some quite ugly things as well in terms of its treatment of female characters that, you know, this one

I think it's an improvement but it's a low bloody bar, right? You know, so there's some things it does much worse and there's some things it does much better. I don't, you know, I struggle to unpick, like, whether you can arrive at a binary conclusion of one being better than the other, but it's interesting the differences, and we'll get into that, you know. Yeah, it's also, it's also difficult to bring, not bring a lot of other baggage to

this, since it is a J.J. Abrams film, and J.J. Abrams is the franchise killer. The, the killer of great franchises that I love, like Star Trek and Star Wars. Well, the funny thing is, actually, he's kind of like he, you know, without getting into kind of like the Star Trek example to it, it's like he does both. It's like, it's kind of like that dark night thing, you know, you either die

hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, because like the Force Awakens. Yeah. You know, anyway, we'll get into it, and I'm sure we'll get it, because Abrams is a big figure, kind of like, and this is kind of like his, you know, almost kind of like his kind of like nucleation point in mainstream

cinema, I would say, and he goes on to be the figure he is now. So we'll get into that, but there's a lot to unpick there, I think, as well. Yeah, like I say, it's his directorial debut. He went on to do the other franchises that he's known for, Star Trek, Star Wars, and he hasn't actually directed

anything since Rise of Skywalker. I don't think he should be allowed to direct anything again after the Rise of Skywalker. So maybe that's happening, but... Somehow Abrams returned. No.

But this film has his grubby fingerprints all over it. It's a distillation of his filmmaking philosophies in one film. So like to say, I'm bringing my baggage of not particularly liking his sensibility to this film in its entirety. But in terms of production, so originally David Fincher was slated to direct the third Mission Impossible film. And I think he wisely dropped out when he realized he should not do with the third in a franchise series. I wonder where he learned not less.

Exactly. He's quoted in an MTV interview as saying, I think the problem with third movies is the people who are financing them are experts on how they should be made and what they should be. I think we can kind of disagree with that, seeing the trajectory of this franchise and how wildly disparate the entries are. But you go on to say, at that point when you own a franchise like that

you want to get rid of any extraneous opinions I'm not the kind of person who says let's see the last two I see what you're going for you'll never hear me say whatever is easiest for you so Fincher wanted to make what he wanted to make and he didn't want to go with what other producers wanted and we've talked before about

how this is a produced franchise this is Cruz and Paula Wagner making their franchise it's not necessarily director led even though the directors do lead to some interesting creative differences But anyway, Fincher didn't do it, probably wisely. And he dropped out to make Zodiac instead, which for me is one of his best films.

Joe Carnahan was chosen to replace him, and he worked on the film for 15 months. This was going to have Kenneth Branagh, Carrie Ann Moss, Scarlett Johansson. There was another creative dispute, and Carnahan quit. Tom Cruise then called JJ Abrams, having binge watched the first two seasons of alias, and gone, yeah, that's our guy. And Abrams signed on, and it was delayed for a year because he was busy we've lost. And they lost some of the cast members. Ricky Jervais was cast as Benjamin Dunn, Benji, but had scheduling conflicts of replace.

God Almighty. I didn't know that. I didn't know that little nugget of information. There's a fucking bullet dodged right there. There's a mid-2000s bullet dodged. Oh, God. That would have been absolutely dreadful. Very trendy figure. Very trendy figure. Ricky Jervise, fuck me, man. And eventually,

Paramount Fitchers, eventually greenlit the film after the film's budget was redeveloped and Cruz took a major pay cut to get it made. It's not like you need someone, he's doing fine. There was also a distribution issue

after the film was produced, which I'll mention because it's speaks to some of the crew's behind-the-scenes stuff that we alluded to in the last episode. So allegedly, Tom Cruise demanded that Viacom, who owns Paramount,

who made this, and also owns Comedy Central, demanded that Comedy Central not rebroadcasts the South Park episode trapped in the closet. Now, this is the South Park episode that is about

Scientology and the Church of Scientology and represents what science-scientology believes in in terms of Xenu the alien and cosmic life force and blah blah blah and also alludes to the tabloid rumours of the time of tom cruise being gay so the allegation is that tom cruise refused to participate in mission impossible free publicity unless that episode was pulled from rebroadcast now he's later said he didn't say that but it led to a controversy

political bloggers and commentators were talking about free speech and saying you have to boycott Mission Impossible Free because they're going against free speech and not letting this South Park episode there. Cruz eventually said he didn't do that. He wouldn't even worry about that kind of thing because he's so busy making movies and saving cinema. And he said, could you ever imagine sitting down with anyone? I would never sit down with someone and question them on their beliefs. You're allowed to question people about their beliefs, Tom. you're saying that because you're a cult leader

because you're in a cult This is also I don't want to drag us to you all the time This is around about the height of I think cruise making a lot of things In or at least the lead up to this film Cruise making a lot of statements in public Which I think people have conveniently forgotten about

Right This is also around about the time Where I think he did the You know he did his public statement about like psychiatry being a you know a pseudoscience and um he criticized brook shields for using antidepressants and you know with no due respect at all tom fuck you you don't know what you're talking about yeah you know it's just like i you know and people have forgotten this and i think if you look at the if you look at the history of scientology he probably

probably still holds these beliefs, right? He's just a lot more quiet about them now. Yeah. And in the interests of, you know, the Hollywood machine continuing to make money and his films continuing to make money, I think everybody, including him, has come to the conclusion that it's probably to better keep these things themselves. He still had the...

And I think this is the height of that period where they haven't quite come to that realisation yet. No, this is sort of the height of Tom Cruise crazy. like you say I think he's still Tom Cruise crazy but he hides it better or his PR machine

handles it better because this is the point where he is dating maybe married to Katie Holmes yeah he's married to Katie Holmes by this point they got married the year this came out of it they got married the year this came out

and they had a daughter together Katie Holmes has said since said that this was essentially she was brainwashed into Scientology and this was something of a coercive relationship and they are no longer affiliated with Scientology and have as little to do with Cruz as possible, is my understanding.

But this is very much Cruz in his big Scientology period, like you say, that reflect in the Church's beliefs in anti-psychiatry and anti-medication and all this nonsense. So that's sort of going on behind the scenes. He's becoming more of a cult leader figure and becoming more associated in the public eye with Scientology. I don't think this bleeds into the film particularly, apart from this distribution and promotion issue, in a way that I think it will bleed into later films. But this is eventually released at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2006, and then released the next month in the United States, May 2006.

So, 2006 in cinema, the top grossing films are, number one, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest. I, before you go any further I've looked at this ranking and this is rough fucking reading frankly I'll let you continue but I'm just going to say that scene

this is a rough top ten looking at its entirety is a lot of bad blockbusters yeah exactly Pirates of the Camby and Dead Man's chest is the second Dead Man's chest

I think it's the second So what Because it was The first one And I'm trying to remember what the other What the other sequel was called The third is at world's end Yeah

Okay Yeah so this is the second one So this is the second part The Gaumpian film Number one in the box office By a clear margin as well Number two is the DaVinci Code Number three is Ice Age the Meltdown

Which coincidentally I actually watched quite recently with my daughter Oh sure is that the first sequel yeah no it is the yes it is the second one it's the second one yeah because the one after this is

I think dawn of the dinosaurs or something like that yeah yeah number four Casino Royale now that's interesting because we've been talking about the Brosnan Bond series in the previous in the previous episodes and Mission Impossible has now outlived that bond and gone on to

this new this new phase of bond represented by Casino Royale which is the best Bond film and he's genuinely really good Night at the Museum at number five Cars at number six

yeah low Pixar X Men the Last Stand at number seven Yeah Mission Impossible 3 at number eight Superman Returns at number nine I liked Superman Returns when it came out

I don't know how I'd feel on revisiting it. I think it's better than its reputation applies. It's still not great. No. And happy feet at number 10. George Miller, director of Man MacShoey Road, George Miller's happy feet.

Such a weird film. I think I genuinely have to come down to it. I'm just like scanning down this list, right? If we take Casino Royale out of the equation, right, which I do genuinely think is a really good film, I think you have to get down to number 14 in The Departed before you really get to a film where I'm like unequivocally, yeah, that's a good film, you know?

Well, yeah, this top ten is a lot of sequels, a lot of thirds in trilogies, and a lot of children's films. There's a lot here. And I think genuinely, I think the next film on this list where I would genuinely say, that's a good film, I enjoyed that. It's probably Spike Lee's Inside Man.

It's not great. A rough year for cinema. This is genuinely, I think, one of the roughest box office top grocers we've looked at across any of these series we've done, to be honest. It's not good. I always want to look at the Academy Awards for the year after just to see what won. Okay, we get Pans Labrump, I guess, later in the year. An inconvenient truth Little Miss Sunshine

That's King of Scotland Yeah, it's not a great year It was a good year for impressions though Because the Pirates of the Caribbean film At least did bring Davy Jones into the world Which has been a endless source of quotes for me since its release Is that Bill Naye? Yeah

Yeah That's not the worst pilots film No worse ones No again, that's a low bar That's a low bar Scraping the bow. So, yeah, that's a context in which this comes out. Politically, there's a lot of context that goes into this film,

which I imagine we'll discuss as we go through it. So maybe we should just start and press on into the film. So we open, in media res, on a torture scene. So already we're getting the kind of enhanced interrogation, quote, unquote, wrote that the U.S. was doing at the time in Guantanamo Bay to do with the Iraq War. This was very big at the time because of shows like 24, where... I was always said 24 must have been kind of at the height of his popularity. Exactly.

So Kiefer Sutherland would go and torture brown people to find the location of Middle Eastern terrorists or whatever. Tell me! Yeah, yeah, he'd shout at people to tell him. And we'll get another torture scene like that later on in the film. But we open straight away on this deeply unpleasant torture scene between Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays the villain in this, and Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt. So everything's grim and dark, and Hoffman is threatening to shoot Ethan Hunt's wife in the head if you don't get something called a rabbit's foot, which we'll learn about later.

Or will we? Or not, is the case maybe. So I do associate this kind of in-media reason. opening and then flashing back to one week earlier or two weeks earlier or whatever with this period of history so tv like to do this a lot i i associate this in my mind with battle star galactica which is probably a bit unfair because it probably only did it once or twice but it feels like you've got a lot of openings and then it would cut to two weeks earlier and you'd find it how you got there and it's a lazy device and it didn't really work here it's something that that what's the

CD with Claire Danes that series did it a lot as well, probably a little bit later than here, but yeah, I see what you mean, it's a common thing. You find out in the first episode and then it slowly strings it out over the subsequent ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After this torture scene, there's a title sequence which feels a bit perfunctory. We don't even get much of the theme, and we cut to an engagement party with Ethan Hunt and the woman that Hoffman was torturing. She is Julia, she's played by Michelle Mon.

her hand and she is Ethan's fiance. This is their engagement party. Interestingly, Julia's sister mentions that neither Julia nor Ethan have parents anymore, which is interesting because we last heard of Ethan's parents a few films ago, presumably they're now dead. Ethan is now pretending to be in transport infrastructure. He's like a mid-2000s middle-class white American domestic bliss in suburbia kind of thing. I think this film goes for a kind of Ethan as All-American Family Man, which I think worked better than the sexy daredevil, Ethan from the last film, even if it is a completely different character. Like, he's completely different again from the way he's been in the past two films.

But we're getting closer to how Ethan will be going forward. At the party, the brief shot of Jesse from Breaking Bad, which was news to me, even after having watched it two years ago. And he'll be in it again later. very very briefly but even gets a phone call during the party from his handler so he goes to 7-11 to liaise with him

it's Dr. Manhattan himself Billy Crudup who I think is the first actor in Mission Impossible to overlap with our previous series because he was in Alien Covenant might be wrong there might be someone I'm missing

but yeah Billy Crudup is his handler kind of replacing Anthony Hopkins from last time And Agent Farris has gone missing in action and Crudup wants Hunt to go find her. He gets a mission briefing on a little disposable camera because it's the mid-2000s. And Crudup has already assembled a team made up of Lufor, Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rees Myers,

who didn't get to do a lot, and Maggie Q. And the idea is that they'll go and find Agent Farris and bring her back. Ethan is now training IMF agents and Agent Farris is one of the first of them. of the agency is trained. He got quite close to her, but not that close, as he tells Lufa later on. But, you know, he's quite close in a training capacity. Similar to how he'll be in Top Gun Maverick.

I think you have in your notes. I haven't seen Top Gun Maverick, so I can't speak to that. Yeah, the funny thing is, I haven't actually watched Top Gun Maverick myself, so we can't go into a huge amount of detail. I just find it interesting that, like, certainly at the start of that, he's training kind of like the new, you know, the new generation of fighter pilots. And that's kind of the position he finds himself in here is almost like that's kind of like

the default position that they want for crews going into these franchise in the future. Because, of course, in the next one, and we'll talk about Mission Possible for more detail and get to that episode. But there is this kind of like character kicking around where the idea was, you know, is that going to be somebody who is now the lead in the franchise. So, like, it's kind of, it's that same thing where, you know, it gets slightly confused about where to position Tom Cruise as he ages

in these franchises that he's the icon for and obviously in the case of Mission Impossible just like they're just going to go for it with him right but it's interesting that that's kind of the that's the default kind of like character role that they seem to kind of have him fall back to yeah so Ethan makes up a conference to Julia and he goes to meet his team

and they break into a factory in Berlin where Agent Farris is being held this is a boring sequence but it evokes the kind of American military interventions of the mid-2000s including the assassination of Osama bin Laden they're sneaking into the facility

and trying to rescue someone and blah blah blah there's a series of explosions that take out the power and remote guns confuse the baddies and he goes to rescue Agent Ferris there's a gun battle very briefly which is incoherent because the blocking and cinematography

don't establish the space I had very little idea of what was going on during this sequence to be perfectly honest I'd go so far as to say and there's things I'd like in the stage in the film like I quite like the fact that Kerry Russell's an actor I have a lot of time for and I think I quite liked her

when she was given something to do here which is not a lot in places but this sequence I go so far as to say that I think it's ineptly directed I have very little idea what's going and there's very little understanding of space. The action sequences are shot poorly. The motivations are changed throughout the scene. It's not, it's just not well done.

It's just not well done. The action scenes are shot poorly. The blocking in cinematography is bad. They don't establish location, like I said. And it's throughout the film. This applies to every action scene will come to. It is particularly egregious in a scene on a bridge later on, which you would think would be impossible to mess up

because it is on a bridge. going in a straight line. How can you not establish the space on, you know, literally one plane of movement, but he manages to do it. So they escape in a helicopter with Agent Farris. This leads to a helicopter chase for a wind farm, which should be more exciting

and would be if it was easier to see what was going on. But it's two black helicopters against the black night sky. And frankly, you can't see a lot apart from the power. turbines, the windmills. Meanwhile, Ethan scans Farris for some kind of torture chip in her head and he needs to defibrillator to

deactivate it, but he's too late and it kills her instantly. In a very unpleasant moment where her eye kind of gets all bloodshot and points in the wrong direction. And there's a bit of a gratuitous focus on, I think, her face in this moment of death. So that mission fails and Ethan and Crudup are brought

before a committee led by Lawrence Fishburn. And I think this, this kind of focus on the committee is a reflection of how America at this time wants to represent itself as kind of bogged down in bureaucracy and legal hearings. And that's because America entered an illegal war a few years prior and was pulled up by, you know, Congress and the United Nations and other countries. So I think America kind of represents itself through this film as being bogged down in these legalities when they were. want to go in and get the job done.

It's complicated by Crudup's character later in the film, but this is generally a reflection of where America is at this point, you know, mid-2000s in the midst of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Ethan attends Faris' funeral and has some flashbacks to combat training with her, and then he receives a postcard from her with a micro dot on it. And I've made a note in my notes that this is where the film could have started with him getting a postcard from someone he has trained. Didn't need all that stuff in Berlin.

So Luther and Ethan go to Benji, who is played by Simon Pegg, in a brief comic relief role to decrypt what is on hard drives that they were covered from the raid on Berlin. And Benji finds information about Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, Devian, attending an event where he intends to sell something called the Rabbit's Foot. And Simon Pegg gives some brief exposition about the rabbit's foot, which is also referred to as an anti-god.

The rabbit's foot is just an object to drive the plot. We never find out what it is, and there's a scene at the end that even teases the audience with the kind of postmodern meta-textuality of you'll never know what this is. And there's a couple of things here, like just to linger on this room. I have a lot to say about this, so you go ahead. Yeah, we'll come back to this. at the conclusion of the film, right? But

I don't have a problem with the idea of McGuffins, right? Because, like, if you had a problem with the idea of a macuffin, you'd have a problem with a lot of films, right? I was going to say, right? This is treated as a MacGuffin by a lot of people. So they refer to the rabbit's foot as a JJ Abrams Mcuffin. And

J.J. Abrams talks about mystery boxes, which I'll talk about in a minute. But, yeah, it's referred to as a Macuffin, which was kind of adopted by Alfred Hitchcock. as a short hand for the thing that drives the plot, the object that the audience don't really care about, but which drives the narrative and which the stars of the film are trying to find.

So George Lucas describes R2D2 as the MacGuffin of the original Star Wars, and the Ark of the Covenant is the MacGuffin of Raiders the Lost Ark, for example. Yeah, right. So, you know, some of my favourite films use MacGuffins. I think the thing that really annoys me about this particular use, and it's not exclusive to this, but it is indicative of the way that J.J. Abrams uses them, right? And this is probably something that you'll probably touch upon

when you're talking about the whole mystery box thing, is it seems to revel in the idea that it is a MacGuffin, right? It's not really hanging anything on it, right? it's not being used as a catalyst for something other than moving the plot for me to be, right? Other things, you know, it attaches some sort of character motivation to it or, like, the point is, in moving,

in using it to move the plot for me to be, it kind of espouses something else with the film, right? Here it does no such thing. It does no such thing beyond kind of like the most basic motivations. And I don't know, I don't think this is the worst example of J.J. Abram's use of Emiguffin, but it's still not a good one. No, it's, the rabbit's foot is nothing. It's a biological weapon. It's a nuclear weapon. It's, it doesn't matter what it is, and they won't tell us. I have seen a rumor that the rabbit's foot will actually be explained in the next mission impossible, because apparently some people saw it in the trailer.

But for now, in terms of this, it is a classic Abrams mystery box. So this term comes from a TED talk that JJ Abrams delivered, where he talked about mystery boxes as his kind of philosophy of filmmaking and philosophy of writing narratives. And I watched the whole TED talk as part of this, which I've never sat down and done before. and his idea of the mystery box is a lot more incoherent than just a MacGuffin and it's often referred to as a MacGuffin and a MacGuffin that you don't know what it is but his idea is so much more incoherent than that

he refers to mystery boxes in several different ways that are fundamentally incompatible so he talks about the basic idea is that you have something in a film that the characters want but you don't have to tell people the audience what it is because the characters want it, okay? The focus is on character. And he says, you know, in the alien films, he says,

you don't see the xenomorph that much. In Jaws, you don't see the shark that much. He calls them mystery boxes. Then a minute later, he shows a clip from George with Roy Shider's character talking to his kid. And he says, now that's what should be in the mystery box. character.

But you just said the mystery box of Jaws was the shark. And now you're saying that character is in the mystery box. It is incoherent. And he talks very fast to mask all this. But it's an incoherent concept. It just does not make sense. So this idea of the mystery box will drive a lot of his filmmaking. And he created Lost, which is a show about mystery.

The mystery boxes, you know, the mystery of what the island is is supposed to drive it, but it's also about the character, so it doesn't really matter what the island is. And I've seen Severans referred to as a mystery box show, you know, where we don't know what's going on with the inies and the outies and the company, Lumen. The problem with his conception is that he refers, he gets the term mystery box from a box of magic tricks that he bought when he was a kid. and he's never opened this box of magic tricks so it has all the potential of the mystery inside the box but he is the audience for the box and not the creator of the box

the creator of the mystery box knows what's in the mystery box they created it when you are creating something and saying it's just a mystery box and I don't know what's in it that's just bad storytelling so I mean

without to return to my point without something else to hang on it, it becomes very bad story. So to take the lost example, right, I think the end of that series notwithstanding, right, and this is kind of like held up as kind of the worst example of the JJ Abrams mystery box thing, right? It sets up a whole bunch of stuff and it never explains them because frankly, I don't think it's really interesting explaining them, it doesn't know what it is, right? But the thing about lost is, it had enough room to breathe that you did actually get to understand more about the characters, right? Now,

You can pick apart whether that was worth it for any one individual character. But the point is, that was there, right? It's not there in The Rise of Skywalker. It's not there in this film. It's not there in Star Trek Into Darkness, right? The point is this, when particularly feature-length film, sort of like, certain scenarios, it falls, to me, anyway, it falls on its face far more. often than it doesn't. He's got away with it

in Lost. First of all, he wasn't directed every episode of Lost, right? So, you know, I mean, that was a very large, sprawling creative effort. I'll also defend Lost. As Lost explained a lot more of its mysteries more than it gets credit for. Yeah, exactly, right. I think it, I think its reputation on that front

is, maybe not entirely unfounded, but I think it's exaggerated a bit in retrospect, particularly with people being dissatisfied with the ending of the series of it. But the point is that it really got into characters there, right? It has the time to do that. It doesn't do that here. It just does not do it at all. No, it picks up characters that has already been developed, even though, you know,

Ethan's an entirely different character in this one. But yes, it doesn't focus on the character, which is what J.J. Abrams sort of says in this talk should be the point of it. It's just, I advise you to go and watch the talk itself, because it is incoherent. He talks about Star Wars at one point and he says at first the recording on R2D2 is the mystery box and you're wondering what they're going to get out of that and then there's the mystery of who Ben Kenobi is and that becomes the mystery box

and then it's the mystery box of what the death side is it's like these aren't all mystery boxes these are just questions driving the narrative it's yeah it's a concept that means everything to him and nothing but that's the rabbit's foot so we're going to have to put up with that for the rest of the film

and they need They need to get the rabbit's foot from Philip Seymour Hoffman's character. Fine. So Ethan can't tell Julia where he's going to liaise with, to intercept Hoffman. So to get make it up to where they get married in a hospital. They then have sex at a workplace, which is, again, a hospital. Ethan brings his team together to tell them that they need to break into the Vatican

to intercept Devion and his buyers so in Rome Hunt and Reese Myers pretend to be stereotypical fiery Italians they cause a traffic jam by the via the Vatican I honestly this scene I think

when he kind of like start scaling the wall and infiltrating the Vatican I actually quite like that scene I was going to say this is the most fun I had in the film yeah right that that bit that is genuinely like quite a lot of fun which has been rather absent up to this point right but honest to God when him and

Jonathan Rees-Meyers are having this argument in Italian as like a DHL drivers and they're you know they're talking like there's other Italian shouting at them they just I've spent a lot of time in Italy, right? Because my now wife, she lived there for like four years or something.

And, you know, she was there as a kid, she's fluten Thai. So I've also been like a passenger in a lot of conversations in Italian with Italians. These two just don't sound Italian at all. This is like the worst espionage ever. And like, listening to them argue with each other in Italian,

I just could not get out of my head that scene in inglorious bastards where, like, where Brad Pitt's, I think it's Aldo Raine is the character's name when he's at that reception, he's trying to convince Christoph Waltz that he's Italian, and he's just going,

bonjourno. Bonjourno. Gorlami. You know, that's what it sounded like to me, right? But I think it's meant to be presented as a, oh yeah, here's our slick espionage team, and they're, you know, they're going about their business, and here we go. You know, and it's like, no, no,

this is like terrible Amdram Italian levels. Like, it's so bad. I still enjoy it because it's quite fun and especially scaling the wall and making the copy of... That bit I like. That bit I like. Filling the cameras. That's fun. Blah, blah, blah.

This is the closest bit to a fun heist in the film. And it's still not very fun because ultimately everything goes well and nothing unexpected or interesting happens. So it's not great. But yeah, this really reminding me of what these films are supposed to be, which is fun.

Up to now, it's been rather po-faced and serious, and Ethan is no fun. And at least in the last film, he was a super spy, you know, shagging his way across Europe. Australia, rather, Australia. It never leaves Australia. But now he's just surrounded by death, and he's weighed down by the violence around him.

It's, you know, at least Mission Impossible 2 wasn't boring, but this is largely quite boring. Certainly up to this point Yes So Maggie Q is on site She gets photos of Hoffman And they use an on-site mask printer To sculpt a rubber Hoffman mask

There is a fun shot Where they change from Cruz to Hoffman digitally Over the course of the shot That's fun But even dresses up as Davian and intercepts Darian in the bathroom They program the voice chip and whatever But ultimately he knocks him out

He takes his identity any suitcase. They escape, they blow up a car to fake Davian's death, and they abscond in a speedboat down the Tiber. It's fun. I quite enjoyed it. It feels like sneaking into and

doing a heist on the Vatican should be more fun and more memorable, but I'll take it. Yeah. Like, it's interesting. This is the, like, and this is, I genuinely think this is probably the only part of the film where I think it recreates,

some of that tension that you get in and just to be clear I don't think it does it as well as the examples I'm about to list but this is the only time where I think it recreates some of the tension that you get in some of the espionage scenes

in the first film I think it's the only time it really managed to recreate some of that tension that you get from the building infiltration sequence in the previous film this is the first point where frankly it feels like what this film is supposed to be, I think where it understands what these films should be doing well, right? This sort of

like combination of spy action, heist, and sort of like, you know, hard as Neil's action stuff, right? I think this is the, this is kind of the primary sequence where I feel like it really gets that, you know, in a way that it certainly hasn't up to this point in the film and it kind of wavers in and out of after this point, I would say. Well, yeah, when I watch this a few years ago and did a reviews per minute review of it

at reviews per minute dot simonxx.com I wrote that I didn't like it because there's no central heist there's actually a bunch of mini heists there's actually quite a few

mini heists but they all feel quite boring and they're not given the centrality of the big heist in Mission Impossible and they don't feel

particularly fun even though they should so this I'll agree with you is the closest they get but it's still not the same thing. I want to talk briefly about Maggie Q's character as well at this point, because she's not going to get a lot more to do that she gets in this vacancy.

So there's an article by Ilaria Boncari in culture and organisation that I referenced in the last episode about the sexism surrounding Tandyway Newton's character in the last film, where she briefly mentions that in this film, Zen's character. the character of Zen, played by Megakue, is sexy, but does not appear to be sexualized, like in the previous episodes. She seems to bear the seeds of what will later become a more professional and balanced view of a female heroine. And like I said, in the last episode, this article is largely a reading of Ilsa Faust,

who I believe comes up in the next film, maybe the film after. Film after. So we'll talk about it more then, but we're getting the seeds in this film of of how the female actors, heroines will become in this franchise. So Ethan has Daviant on a plane. Phillips Seymour Hoffman is belligerent and he threatens, Philip Seymour Hoffman in character is belligerent and threatens Ethan's wife. Yeah, I like Phillips Seymour Hoffman a lot, but I think he's just okay in this.

I think he doesn't get a lot to work with. But Ethan almost immediately resorts to torture. specifically threatening to throw Davian out of the plane and it's very 24, it's very enhanced interrogation, it's very talk, tell me what I need to know. It's a reflection of an America that is scared about terrorism following 9-11 and has no patience for countries not cooperating with it

going around doing whatever it wants. It's no patience for international law or definitions of war crimes. Lufa finally gets into Farris' micro-o. dot which was on the postcard that she sent and it's a video that reveals that Lawrence Fishburne is working with Davian but just as Ethan learns this their convoy is attacked on a bridge there's lots of explosions the helicopter attacks the IMF team to free Hoffman and and Hoffman escapes now I mentioned this bridge scene earlier because I think it's a microcosm of the film this big long

bridge, which goes across Chesapeake Bay in real life, this big long bridge sounds like an interesting location to film on paper, but in practice, it's just long and samey and looks a bit dull. I mentioned that they don't really manage to establish the space, even on this long bridge, and I'll mention that this is, this feels like a JJ Abrams, Alex Kurtzmanism, where the villain gets captured halfway through the film, but it's actually part of their plan, because they will reuse this whole cloth in Star Trek Into Darkness, which made

me think about a lot of the similarities between this film and Star Trek Into Darkness, not just the villain being captured. Which as soon as you said it, actually, it also explains why on a re-watch I'm probably less into this film now was, because Star Trek Into Darkness

is a film I think we mentioned as for it. It's a film I hate with a passion. You hate it. Not by myself. but apart from the there is the aesthetic of this film which I should discuss I'll do so in a minute

there is the aesthetic of this film there is the villain getting captured halfway through there is the corruption at the heart of the good organisation in this case it's the IMF with Billy Crudup's character and in Star Trek Into Darkness

it's Robocops Starfleet Admiral who has built some killer killer version of the Enterprise or whatever it's a theme that Alex Kirtzman likes a lot because all his Star Trek stuff

is obsessed with this darkness at the heart of Starfleet this darkness at the core of the Federation it's true actually because even Star Trek Beyond has that actually doesn't it? Star Trek Beyond has that Star Trek Discovery has that where I believe

I couldn't get through Star Trek Discovery it's fucking awful but Alex Kirtsmann's show around that and Alex Kirtzman is responsible for New Trek he has presided over the slate of New Trek programs and has had more of a hand in Discovery and Picard which are the worst of the bunch and he's obsessed with this darkness at the heart of Starfleet

so Jason Isaacs manages to infiltrate Starfleet as a evil version from the mirror universe Michelle Yeo is some genocidal emperor who goes on to be in Section 31 which is the dark clandestine wing of Starfleet that he's obsessed with

it's all shite and it's all rubbish and he's ruined Star Trek yeah I don't feel as passionate about Star Trek as you do so but what I will see is I think

to return to Mission Possible, right? I think this sequence, right, the one on the bridge, I find this a fascinating one because this feels to me like it's the it's the iconic Mission Possible 3 moment, right? Whenever you see any sort of like highlights real this film, it always includes this sequence, right? It's specifically, it's that one shot of cruise running. Yeah, running and then the drone comes in, there's an explosion, he slams into the car.

yeah and i've seen some behind the signs footage of that and in true tom cruise fashion like he did that and kind of like you know he's rigged up with a wire and you know and like whatever that one tiny moment is all right you know that one tiny moment is all right but i think the thing that's overlooked is this sequence is kind of incoherent up to this point like he bounces up and down this bridge going back and forth getting shit in a way that doesn't make a huge amount of sense, right? Or at least even if it does make sense, like I kind of followed what was going on, but it's

not, it doesn't feel very dramatically or visually satisfying, you know? There's like a lot of stuff blows up, a lot of people run around, the IMF team, you know, shepherd a lot of people out of their cars to safety air quotes, right?

But like, it doesn't, it's just not very satisfying. Like, I feel like there should be more tension in the idea of, you know, when you get the sequence of kind of like the drone in the distance turning around and it's quite clear it's coming back in for like the kill, it doesn't feel as anticipatory or dangerous as it should, right? The main thing I have is a takeaway from this is like, you know, if you think about when this film came out, 2006, so kind of like, you know, off the back of, you know, Afghanistan, we're three years into the Iraq war at this point.

the use of a drone here is fascinating right given on the role that these will go on to play in like American you know foreign interventions and things and we're probably already playing at this point but maybe we've just got less of a you know less visibility of it that's kind of fascinating actually right and they're being used on US soil right I feel like there's more subtext there I would like to have seen more of but it's not really yeah you know it's not really there but like this the sequence it just doesn't quite work for me and I

I find it interesting that it's kind of like the iconic moment always comes up in highlights reels because I don't think it's another one, a little bit like the Berlin sequence where I don't think it's particularly well done, to be honest with you and it looks, it looks, it looks so ugly, I hate the aesthetic of this film. Okay, let's talk about the aesthetic

because I haven't talked about it so far and it does have a very consistent aesthetic, which is oversaturated, digital camera aesthetic, where in action scenes, the frame is constantly shaking the colour grading makes everything look flat and soft

there's no colours that pop you know I can think of reds and greens from Mission Impossible too but there's no colours that pop here it's all very grey and flat the action scenes are underlit as I mentioned with the wind farm scene earlier the scene in Berlin

is underlit as well and it all looks deeply unpleasant I just don't like the aesthetic and I do associate it with J.J. Abrams it's a little different in Star Trek because there's a lot more lens flare which distracts the eye

but he doesn't quite have that here but there is still this flat digital camera oversaturated look that I do not like like. Basically just take any kind of like short sequence from this film and compare it

to anything from the first mission possible. Yeah. Or frankly the second one, right? Even the second one. Like the second one, you know, I think in particular outdoor sequences in the second one, I don't think they look particularly great, but like there are sequences

where it try it's trying to look cinematic, right? This, it looks it's so flat and it's so, like people talk a lot about kind of like the modern action movie like sludge, right? You know, and it's

common thing. I think it's an overused thing in complaining about kind of like a lot of big budget films these days, particularly like comic book films and that sort of thing. But there is something to it, right? And here it's here, that's the look

that is clearly being applied, but layered on top of it is this you know, we're in 2006, this kind of like the early age of digital cinematography as well. And it doesn't, it just is dated. For a film that Otherwise, I don't think, would date too badly.

It dates it a lot, right? This film is very dated visually, right? In a way that I don't think the first mission possible is. And frankly, I think visually, I don't think the second mission possible is. The second mission impossible is very dated in a lot of ways. I'm not convinced that visually is one of them, but this one definitely is. No, I'm thinking back to the crispness of De Palma's, you know, split diopter shots

and how he frames characters within the frame and it's just a far cry from this which as you say is all digital camera aesthetic when I think of digital camera aesthetic I think of inland empire in 2006 David Lynch is inland empire

which he filmed on I don't know a very small digital camera because he was very impressed with the digital camera technology and I don't think it looks particularly great these days. It sort of creates an uncanny effect which works for the film, but it's not particularly great. But that's the same year. So, you know, people are switching over to digital cameras rather than film. I assume that's what they shot this on. Just gets got

that feeling. And it does feel dated, like you say. I think it is part of a number of factors that really date this in the mid-2000s, you know, the torture, the Abrams' mystery box, nuss of it all. It really fits into this period of history. And it looks bad. It makes the action scenes look bad. It makes the non-action scenes look bad. It's just an unpleasant film to watch. An ugly film in more ways than one. So where are we? From the Bridge, Ethan calls, but Jesse from Breaking Bad answers and tells him that Julie is at the hospital and some British guy has been asking around for her she gets kidnapped by some guy while Ethan searches for her

and he gets a phone call from Philip Seymour Hoffman who demands that Ethan bring the rabbit's foot to him and the location is in the suitcase and then Ethan gets captured by the IMF and Fishburn tells him that he's an irresponsible rogue agent and he says a lot of hyper-patriotic things kind of reflecting the hyper-patriotism and neo-conservatism of the George W. Bush years

he says, I'll bleed on the flag to make sure the stripes stay red and there's this big emphasis on democracy and America's doing what it has to do to protect democracy even if that merely torturing people and killing them. This is where, this is the thing about the film, that I find kind of fascinating, right? Because the politics of this film on a rewatch, I find really interesting because the way this works, right?

And obviously, you know, we're not about spoilers in this because we're coming at this from a sort of like an analyse it. So it will eventually come out later in the film that Billy Crudup's character who's been presented as kind of like, you know, their, you know, man in the brass who's helping them in his understanding, right? That's how he's been positioned up to this point, right? It will eventually come out that he's the guy, of like helping Owen Davian, right?

The, you know, Philip Seymour Hoffman's villainous character. Yeah. But up to this point, we've had the suspicion placed on... Lawrence Fishburn. Is it Brassel, isn't he? Anyway, Lawrence Fishburne's kind of like head of the IMF character, right? Musgrave? No, that's Crip.

Yeah. Yeah, so I think it's Brassel, right? I could be wrong. But Lawrence Fishburn's... It doesn't matter. He's not going to be in this franchise. Yeah, exactly, right. He's with rotating...

dating IMF heads that will be gone by the next film anyway, right? So the thing that I find fascinating here is he, that's a statement that comes out of his mouth unironically, right, at a point in the film where he's been positioned as the villain. But what will ultimately happen is it will become apparent that he's actually the good guy and Crudup will be kind of the secondary antagonist who will have his own little kind of rant which will come back to

because the contents of it are fascinating it's the most interesting piece of dialogue in this entire film right like in a little 30 seconds but the thing that's lost in all this is Lawrence Fishburn still said that right? The good guy still said that right and it's this

it's it goes into this where it positions this guy who's kind of like you know ultra-patriotic and doesn't want to get bogged down and, you know, we need to be a country of action and spread democracy and rah, rah, ra, as kind of like the bad guy. But what they're questioning here is this method. It's not the, it's not that philosophical political outlook.

Right. What are criticizing, what the film ends up criticizing is the methodology, not the standard, not the world view. The worldview is kind of presented as being okay, right? But, you know, it's okay because we're the good guys, right? It's this kind of like bad apple thing and the way they go about it. that's the problem. Yeah. You know,

I find that absolutely fascinating. Yeah. Because it is the mainstream world view of America at the moment of George W. Bush, of Donald Rumsfeld, leading America to war illegally to secure oil on the pretense of securing democracy. Even if they were securing democracy in the Middle East, that's no excuse for invading a sovereign nation and killing its civilians. but yeah that's just presented as...

And again, it's the methodology that's questioned, not the worldview, because there's another fascinating throwaway line right, at the point where it's still becoming like you still think that Lawrence Fishburn is potentially, you know, I mean, I think if you've

seen enough of these films, you know where this is going, right? But within the text of the film it's still positioning Fishburn as the antagonist and Crudup is kind of like, you know, the internal the internal support and he goes on to this where he's talking about some mission that they're off on

and Lawrence Fishburn has this line right I'd really love to see that intelligence right so he's questioning the veracity of the intelligence that Crudup is talking about right and that's another fascinating throwaway line

when you consider the you know the world you know the world affairs situation we're in when this film comes out where we've had years of talking about kind of like, you know, a credible threat of weapons of mass destruction and the question is whether it was fabricated, whether it was poor intelligence, whether it was presented wrong, you know, blah, whatever it is, people lied, right? That's basically the

crux of it looking at it in 2025. But again, when you then look at how this is turned around, they're not questioning the worldview, they're not questioning the objectives. It's, are you going about this the right way, right? Are we ticking all the boxes we need to sort of like absolve ourselves and be comfortable in our conscience with what we're doing, right? It's not what we're doing, it's how we're doing it.

I would love to see that intelligence. If the intelligence is fine, then yeah, absolutely. We can go down this road, no questions asked, right? And it's just, it's interesting. It's really fascinating. It's the closest I've come of any of these films so far to like seeing a political statement or at least kind of like a political position in the absence of a statement that, you know, opposes it.

Very interesting you should say that, because the Pat Cassell's article in Los Angeles Review of Books, which I've referred to before, says that despite the heroic public servant at its centre, the mission series has never been traditionally patriotic. It doesn't say that the Mission Impossible series is actually that political. Apart from this film, it says where it brings in these elements of enhanced interrogation, American zealotry, and it quotes, I will bleed on the flag to make sure the striped stays red. But it all brings it back to a demand for accountability, which ties Mission Impossible Free back to the original film when there was a brief scene of a senator wanting to know what the agents were doing with taxpayer dollars.

It says if the mission series has an overarching message about international law and diplomacy, it lies here in its tension between espionage and accountability. This is just what you were saying. It's all okay as long as you can show the intelligence that led you to this moment As long as you can show that you're doing the methodology, right You can justify whatever this team is doing Whatever the IMF is doing So there are questions about accountability of the IMF of the larger US political apparatus

But it's never saying that the American political apparatus is Wrong or fundamentally misguided As long as we can morally justify to ourselves what we are doing, yes, we can go in and we can shoot down a helicopter in a wind farm field in Germany. Yes, we can go and blow up a Lamborghini in the Vatican. Yes, we can go and, like, you know, execute a load of people in, you know, in Shanghai. Like, the point is, it's absolutely no question that what has been done here is the right thing. You know, like, really?

Really? You just blew up a car in the Vatican. Like, what are you doing? It's not even espionage. That was part of the plan. Yeah. There's not a lot of espionage in this film. Because Ethan Will just start killing people.

He just started killing people in Berlin. He was just shooting people. And Fishburn does chew him out for it, but there's not really any consequences to him. And this is just kind of his team's protocol. So, yeah, Crudup communicates with Ethan silently and helps him escape, so Ethan goes to Shanghai, where Crudup has told him the rabbit's foot is. He meets Luther and the team there, and the rabbit's foot is in a... Are we just glossing over the weird leather, leather Hannibal Lecter mask here?

Oh, yeah, Ethan is putting a weird leather Hannibal Lecter mask. That's a weird moment for me. Like, that's just, that was odd. I don't really know what led to that. Yeah, I don't know. I know Alex Kurtzman has an interest in the character of Hannibal Lecter because he wrote for Clarice, the series about Clarice Starling

when they did not have the rights to the character of Hannibal Lecter. Because Alex Kurtzman is not a successful TV producer, despite all the money that still gets thrown at him. This is what I talk about when I mentioned. and bringing my own personal package to this film. Because despite not really having a link there to Alex Kurtzman, I wanted to bring it back to put the knife in one more time. So even goes to Shanghai.

The Rabbit's Foot is in a lab in a skyscraper, like the last film, and Ethan plans a high, beautiful mind style by scrolling on the window. And then they distract guards with baseballs, while Ethan jumps from a neighboring skyscraper to swing onto another skyscraper and sneak into the lab which he does off screen so the fun heist

the point of these films happens off screen and we hear that Ethan has got into the lab and retrieved the rabbit's foot and next thing we see he's jumping out of the lab base jumping into the Shanghai street which I'd actually forgotten about it as an aspect to this film I genuinely as I was watching this I was like did I lean on my remote and like

skip a scene like you know no it genuinely just did not get filmed. Ridiculous. We don't want to see the fun house. We want to see him chasing after an indeterminate canister as it rolls around the road. Yes. Garbage. So yeah, there's a brief car chase through Shanghai and even contacts Hoffman just in time to save his wife. So he goes to meet Hoffman and we get the scene from the start of the

film where Davian is threatening to kill Julia and blah blah. The scene plays out and Davian shoots Julia. But then Crudder Cudup sits down in front of Ethan. He's behind it all. And it's not actually, Julia. It's just a woman in a rubber mask. So Cudup has done it to move fast to spread American democracy. The idea is that he will collaborate with terrorists like Davian in order to plant the rabbit's foot in the Middle East, no specific country is mentioned, so that they can invade and bring democracy to the Middle East. So the big stonking Iraq WMD metaphor here, where if he plants the weapons of mass destruction, it will justify invasion. And this is pointed out as wrong. He is the baddie for this, presumably because, like you said, Jim, he's not doing it in the right way. So Ethan escapes and enlists Benji's help remotely to trace Kudup's last phone call to find Julia.

Julia is also in Shanghai, even escapes the building via the roof and he does some parkour to run to Julia's building. And this is the first instance in the films of Cruz's iconic run, where he goes very fast and he pumps his arms. And Lisa Purse in the book chapter I previously mentioned on Tom Cruise and the aging male action hero describes it as. Cruise sustains a rigidly demarcated, upright physical form, including contained efficient arm swings and intensity of speed and direction, despite the onward approach of obstacles and changes in running surface and terrain layout. She mentions how you can actually hear his voice wobbling and straining in this, and this was likely to be ADR, but it is a convincing all depiction of how taumbra and vocal phrasing can be distorted by physical exertion. so there's an element she says of communicating physical control and intensity despite exertion so Cruz is not afraid to show that he is exerting himself he's not afraid to show that he's pushing himself which distinguishes him from other action stars young or old she

says who just do things and don't worry about it you know you think of Schwarzenegger just being like a robot and walking through baddies no Cruz Cruz shows that this is affecting him he shows that he is exerting himself and pushing himself and it's this that she says generates the acknowledgement and admiration

of Cruz's physical aptitude from film reviewers like people like to see that he is pushing himself to do this kind of thing and it's why he can continue to age and still perform this role which I imagine we'll discuss more in maybe the next episode so Ethan runs and even gets into the building

and there is a fight scene in a room that is far too yellow like this is the worst of the digital camera aesthetic. This room is very very yellow and it just looks ugly and everyone is so sweaty in this scene and it doesn't look great.

Davian turns on his torture chip and beats him up a little but even Hunt exerts himself like I said and musters the strength to tackle Davian and beat him up and pushes him out onto the street where Philip Zymour Hoffman's just hit by her car. Even rescues Julia, so she's for a defibrillator to deactivate the torture ship,

and Julia kills him to deactivate the chip and then resuscitate him. None of this is very fun. None of this is very interesting. She shoots Crudup, and he drops the rabbit's foot. She revives Ethan, and they wander into Shanghai while Ethan tells her the truth about his work. There's a little meta bit where she laughs at something. name Impossible Mission Force, and how silly it all sounds. Fishburn apologises back home and gives Ethan some reward.

He says, call it reparations, which feels like a gross thing to get a black American man to say. Like, reparations means something to do with slavery and historic injustice. You could have said compensation. Yeah, that would have worked a lot better. So to get, to specifically put these words into the mouth. of a black man feels really weird. I hadn't even clocked that

but it's a good point. Yeah. It really slapped me in the face like something I'm about to mention. But Ethan goes off on his honeymoon and Fishburn refuses to tell him what the rabbit's foot is unless he stays and he gives a little grin

and wanders off because you can't pin him down. You don't know if he'll stay. Everyone is reunited. Everyone is happy. Feels a bit anticlimactic. actually after everything and then I was slapped in the face by a

credit song by Kanye West because it is 2006 oh dear oh god yeah rough it probably says a lot about the state of the world that we're in in 2025 in the trajectory of Kanye West that

that is more offensive to me than Limp Bizkit in Mission Possible too that's yeah but these films are dated. We've talked about Mission Impossible 1 being stuck in the 90s, Mission Impossible 2 being very early 2000s, late 90s, and this is mid 2000s, with all the Iraq war stuff, all the torture stuff, Kanye West writing a song for the end credit, it's called Impossible. It's super dated. The funny thing is though, it's like I do have, it's really weird to think about these

first three films, right? And it's worth noting, right, that so there's a gap of, what is it, six years between Mission Possible 2, Mission Possible 3. There's a pretty, there's a reasonable sized gap between this and the, and Ghost Protocol, the

fourth one that we'll talk about in the next episode, right? So if we think about this is kind of like the initial trilogy, it's a weird set of films because as you know, as frustrated as I find myself with

this film in retrospect and coming back to it on a rewatch, it does do a lot of things much better than Mission Possible 2, that I think set the series up to be better in the future, right?

We'll talk about the individual kind of like, you know, virtues and vices of subsequent films when we get to them, but there are some things that this film realizes about the first film, I think, that it brings back. Like, there is a much greater emphasis on the team dynamic

here, which is interesting, given the motivation is largely the abduction of Ethan Hunt's wife, but it leans more on the team dynamic than the last one, right? It's, you know, there's more interaction with other people. He relies on other people more for

progressing his kind of, you know, for progressing his mission. Whereas in the previous one, he's you know, he's a few steps short of being a superhero, frankly, right? It's a very solo endeavour, right? And it's almost kind of like got that dynamic because you've got kind of the hero and then the dark reflection of him and Sean Ambrose. You don't have that here, right, for better or worse, right? You've got that team dynamic. I think it has a pretty

compelling villain in Seymour Hoffman. He's got this sort of like calm, malevolence about him that I think only he could probably have delivered in this scenario as an actor. And I think he's far better than this film deserves, frankly. I think without, without him, if you have somebody else as the villain here, who is less compelling as a screen presence. This ends up a bit of a damp squip, I think, right? You know, so there's that aspect of it.

It has the team dynamic. It does realize, to a certain extent, the heist part of it, but it just kind of botches it. There's a lot of things it does here, where I think it will then be picked up with later films, and it will, it becomes the identity of the film

franchise, right? And the thing that makes it kind of age better and have a bit of momentum from film to film. I think this it feels like a TV pilot to be honest, both in kind of like aesthetics and the way it's put together. And that has a lot of negatives that we've gone through. It does have some positives as well in that I think it sets a blueprint for the films to come that far more accomplished directors, or maybe directors as the case, maybe we're just talking about ghost protocol here. But we'll come to that.

when we talk about those films will then pick up and run with, right? I think the main issue here is I don't particularly, and I think this is kind of cemented it for me, I don't particularly like JJ Abrams as a director, right? I don't

mind him as a creative influence, right? I think when he's less responsible and, you know, when you're Roberto Orchis and you're Altskertsman's maybe, are less responsible for the script, right? And it leans less on this kind of mystery box type stuff. I think as a creative influence, right, in a producer role, let's say, I don't mind Abrams there, right?

And he has his name on many pieces of work in a more off-hand role where I quite like what's come out of it, right? I think when he's more hands-on. A natural producer. Yes, exactly, right. I prefer him as a producer to a director, right? And I think this is a good example of it. I think, frankly, I think Super 8 is another one. It's like, it's okay, but like, you know, and I think Star Trek and Star Trek into darkness are examples of it, where it's, you know, but then him as a producer is a little bit more, I find it more compelling, right?

I'm thinking about Cloverfield, which people often think that he directed, but of course he didn't, right? He was a producer on it. he will be a producer for the next three I think Mission possible films which we'll get into the you know the goods and bads of them when we come to them but I think it's probably safe to say

off the back of our reaction to this film they're all better than this film right you know I find his influence as a as a producer a little bit more compelling right he was also a producer on Star Wars Last Jedi right so for all that kind of like you know maybe

the Force Awakens is a little bit by numbers and The Rise of Skywalker I think I've said before on other seasons podcast genuinely one of the most disappointing big budget films I've seen in the past decade or so. He was a producer on The Last Jedi, right? So he does have

good influence, I think, in a lot of instances. I struggle to see the positive aspects of those influences in the films he directs and I think this is a really good example of it and I think it feels like a directorial debut. And that's a weird thing to be saying about Mission Impossible 3, but it feels like a directorial debut.

It feels like the clumsiest implementation of his directorial style. I think he will go on to make better films. I don't think he'll go on to make any genuinely brilliant films as a director, if I'm honest. But this is probably the clumsiest, I think. I agree. Yeah. Interestingly, the next film will talk about Mission Impossible. Ghost Protocol is Brad Bird's live-action directorial debut.

He directed animated films in the past. But yeah, it's a strange thing to give your franchise over to first-time live-action directors. And yeah, I don't like this film. It's just boring. I remember hating it a lot more, and I think it is ugly. There's a lot of things wrong. There are actively unpleasant elements of it.

But the worst thing of it is that it's just boring, that the action scenes are not fun. For long stretches. Yeah, the actions are not fun. But for long stretches, it's... The heist scenes are largely not fun, or not as fun as they should be. And there's just not much excitement.

So it will, it does do some things that will come to pay off later. It sends down Ethan's character into the shape he is going to be going forward, to some extent. and focuses on the team a lot more, but it doesn't cohere into an interesting package in and of itself. So there's good stuff here, good potential, it's just none of it gets to anything, and it's just tremendously boring to actually watch. I think it shows the worst excesses of JJ Abrams as a creative force, like you said.

it's got a lot of Abrams' mystery box to it it's got a lot of Kurtzmann's preoccupations as I've said with like corruption at the heart of the organisation and capturing the villain halfway through and whatever it's got a lot of Kurtzman and Abrams to it brackets derogatory yeah yeah I think it's also

it kind of represents a bit of in the deer when you think about where action cinema was at this point as well right like we're at a point now which you alluded to at the start when we went over the box office kind of like you know the biggest hit films in the year we're at the point now where even even jane's bond has successfully reinvented itself at this point yeah albeit you know casino royale owes a lot to the born franchise at this point right but it's realized what it it's managed to reinvent itself in a way where it still feels like the same thing but it's evolved in a way that makes it kind of compelling for a modern audience.

This feels very tired, which is ironic, given that it so is the seeds of the things that will be used to kind of springboard this franchise into its own thing. But at the moment, it does feel very tired. It's nowhere near as kind of unique as Mission Possible 2. It's nowhere near as accomplished as Mission Impossible 1. And it does feel like, it feels like a first draft, right?

And I think it's easy to look back on it now and what the Mission Possible series has become and go, all right, yeah, Mission Possible 3, that's where they set themselves on the right track, right? That's where they righted the ship and kind of like it went down that path. It's like, to an extent, like, fine, but I think actually the next film,

and we'll talk about the next film in the next episode in more detail, is genuinely where it actually manages to accomplish this. And you can see some of that in this film, but I think this film is getting a lot more credit than it deserves because it has an increased team dynamic. It has the fun Vatican secret. But when you actually sit down and watch

this film again, it does a lot, extremely clumsily, in a way that is nowhere near as accomplished as what we'll follow it. And I think it's, you know, it's very easy to attach this narrative of oh, it sowed the seeds

of what it would become. It's like, did it, though? Like, did it really? Like, really, we're going to give this credit to J.J. Abrams and not Brad Bird in the next one? Yeah. And I think that streets more to kind of like this figure of G.J. Abrams is the, you know, the franchise resuscitate or like, oh yeah, he brought Star Trek back. Oh, yeah, he brought Mission Possible back. Oh, yeah, he brought Star Wars back. And I'm looking at going, like, did he? Like,

really? I'm not sure he did, to be honest. And, like, to go back to my point to start, the sort of like, you know, the, you know, the dark night thing, like, you know, die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Here he's died a hero. Right? He has not been given additional film... Well, I mean, I think he was invited back for the next one. We'll get into that, right? He hasn't directed another one since then, so it's very easy to attach this narrative to him.

Or kind of like, oh, yeah, I know, he sowed the seeds of what it would become. Whereas, with Star Trek, he made Star Trek, reasonably I received. I don't mind it as a film, it's all right, you know, whatever. Star Trek into darkness, dog shit. Hate it, right? And it killed it, right? You then go to Star Wars, and it's like, he made The Force Awakens. Fun, nice reboot.

bit samey in terms of plot, but like, whatever. It kind of sets things up and introduces new characters. It's fine. It's good. The Last Jedi is a producer. Genuinely, I think it's really great. Don't want to get into the divisiveness of that film. And you get to the rise of Skywalker. Again, in my opinion, I realize that I'm a reasonable-sized minority here,

but I get the feeling increasingly that I'm a minority. Dog shit. I hate it. He, you know, he's lived long enough to become the villain, right? That's not happened with the Mission Impossible franchise. He's been able to hand it off and kind of like hub this narrative of like he saved the franchise. I don't think he did. I think this is

just good enough to not kill it. Yes, I like that analogy a lot. I think to belabor your metaphor from earlier, they have not righted the ship with this film, but they might have started turning the wheel in the right direction. Yeah. It's still taken

on water horrendously and it's sinking but it's at least beginning to point in the right direction. They're at least pointing towards port. That is Mission Impossible 3, 2006's third entry into this franchise. Yes, so next time we'll be covering Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol from 2011, directed by Brad Bird, and we'll look forward to you joining us for that episode, which comes out next month. Until then, thank you very much for joining us on the Impossopod series as we go through these Mission Impossible films. this is produced by Take One Cinema

which you can find at Take OnCinber.net where we produce film reviews for Art House and Festival Cinema Jim, where are you on social media? Jim GR on pretty much most platforms you can think of so I think Blue Sky I'm still on Instagram maybe not for too much longer but mainly Blue Sky I think is where I'm probably most active

in letterboxed. Jim GR Yep, you can find all my stuff linked at SimonXaX.com on the contact page. So follow me wherever. But until then, thank you very much for joining us. Please do like and subscribe and tell your friends. It's the only way that we spread. And we'll be back next month for Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol.

Staying self-destrooked. You know,