Review of Mission: Impossible III (2006) by Jake C — 16 Jul 2018

Looking back at 2006 through the prism of its subtitled sequels-Rogue Ghost, Protocol Nation-MI3 is really the film that cemented the form, tone, and pacing of this series, and in many ways it feels like an outright reboot of the franchise, rather than a middle sibling continuation, after the tonal outlier of MI2 six years prior.

In that way, it sits along side the Star Trek/Wars reboots, except that here, JJ's mystery box narrative tendency, his reliance on obscure objects of desire and unanswered riddles, works better in the spy genre than it does in a sci-fi epic.

What is more, the constitutive ambiguity of the Objet A (the rabbit's foot, a source of luck; the anti-god, a (b)lack hole of desire) is aided here by a really great turn by the late PSH, who grounds the dark pull of the object's mystery not by adding to it (as with Snoke in "The Force Awakens") but by emptying his own character into a sheer force, a Wellesian expression of inhuman drive, brute and monstrous power without even attempting to humanize and rationalize (as with Nero in "Star Trek") his antagonism.