So Jess’s take was, “this is better than the first two movies put together.” And she’s right. The story is a zillion times more narratively sophisticated, for one thing. We start off in medias res with Ethan Hunt captured by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s bad guy. (I think Hoffman got a lot of praise for this role at the time; he deserved it. Just one of the best villains of this sort I’ve seen.) We then cut back to like “you might be wondering how I got here…” and so as the rest of the movie plays out, we know that their schemes are going to fail, and the only question is how it happens. There are the requisite twists and reveals and all that, none of which I’ll spoil here, but the takeaway is that it all happens with a vastly higher level of both coherence and subtlety than the original two movies.

The action sequences are better too, thanks to this being a 2004 movie that is now fully in the CG era, where action sequences can just do whatever they friggin’ want to. Famously, Cruise does a lot of his own stunts, and they’re not fully CG in the way that e.g. Marvel movies are basically cartoons during action scenes, so there is a kind of physicality to them. Despite that, there’s a slickness and polish that you simply didn’t get back in the day and which feels emblematic of modern action.

Ultimately, this is the biggest negative for me: This is a modern movie, for all that it’s 17 years old. Sure you can see the GWB-era attitudes poking out here and there, and all the actors involved are either much older or dead today. But leaving that to the side, if you made this today, it would release in a theater and feel like a normal, current movie. I find myself missing the weird techno-nonsense of the first one, or the John Woo stylistic tics of the second one.

I don’t want to say that I’d rather have a weird movie than a good one, but I think I will say that I’d rather have a weird one than a polished one. Like, while watching this, I genuinely couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen it before, and I landed on believing that I hadn’t. But in fact: Yep, I saw it on release in 2006[1], and it just slipped right out of my brain completely. And then as I was going to write up the Joe Bobs, I had already completely forgotten that I’d watched this, even though it was literally yesterday. So yeah.

  1. My take at the time, which was too short to get its own entry here: “If you’re looking for an action thriller that delivers both action and thrills, well, here you are. Not a movie that will ever make anyone’s “Best Of” list, but certainly more than competent. I don’t think anyone is really that excited any more by spy movies with car chases and exploding things, but if they are, they’ll be really excited by this one.” ↩︎