Why Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble III is the pin­na­cle of the Tom Cruise spy franchise

“Who are you? What’s your name? Do you have a wife? A girl­friend? Because if you do, I’m gonna find her. I’m gonna hurt her. I’m gonna make her bleed, and cry, and call out your name. And then I’m gonna find you, and kill you right in front of her.”

Owen Davian may not be Philip Sey­mour Hoffman’s best per­for­mance, but it’s the one that most read­i­ly dis­plays his genius. The kind of Hol­ly­wood vil­lain who’s usu­al­ly this under­writ­ten by acci­dent, Davian is a gener­ic arms deal­er who spends the brunt of Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble III try­ing to obtain a hilar­i­ous­ly trans­par­ent MacGuf­fin called the ​“Rabbit’s Foot,” the explic­it func­tion of which is nev­er made clear (a Simon Pegg speech infer­ring that it might be the ​“Anti-God” makes the device sound a like a nuclear Ice-nine).

Davian is noth­ing more than snarl and desire, his per­son­al­i­ty defined by the vague sense of bore­dom that the film’s unre­lent­ing hero, super-spy Ethan Hunt, seems to inspire from him. ​“What I’m sell­ing and who I’m sell­ing it to,” he sleep­i­ly inter­jects as Hunt tries to inter­ro­gate him about the Rabbit’s Foot, ​“should be the last thing you’re con­cerned about.” He might as well be speak­ing direct­ly to the audi­ence. The device becomes so irrel­e­vant that the even­tu­al scene in which Hunt retrieves it is left to the imag­i­na­tion – instead, we spend that time in his get­away car lis­ten­ing to a sup­port­ing char­ac­ter mono­logue about her child­hood cat.

Still, it’s aston­ish­ing to see how much some­thing Hoff­man was able to cre­ate from so much noth­ing. Davian is every­thing about the mod­ern movie vil­lain stripped to his func­tion with­in the sto­ry — he isn’t just denied a back­ground or a fuller emo­tion­al life, he’s dis­gust­ed by the mere sug­ges­tion that such details could be even remote­ly rel­e­vant to the nar­ra­tive at hand. When Hunt begins to inter­ro­gate Davian (on a secret gov­ern­ment car­go plane, after kid­nap­ping him from a bath­room at the Vat­i­can, while wear­ing a per­fect latex mask of his face), he looks at the MIF agent the way that Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man might have looked at some­one who began inter­ro­gat­ing him on a secret gov­ern­ment plane after kid­nap­ping him from a bath­room at the Vat­i­can. He looks at Cruise the way that no one has looked at Tom Cruise since he was Thomas Mapother (IV).

Where­as the antag­o­nists in most recent fran­chise films are com­pos­it­ed togeth­er from expo­si­tion, east­er eggs, and viral con­tent, Davian is a tor­na­do in a vac­u­um, a mech­a­nism of a plot in which he has no inter­est in par­tic­i­pat­ing. He is a man defined by his job, and the movie makes a point of nev­er fill­ing in the details of his life beyond that. His neme­sis, an inde­fati­ga­ble Chuck Jones road­run­ner of a super-spy, is the flip side of the same coin.

Owen Davian may not have seen the first two Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble movies, but he knows that there isn’t any boul­der he can put in Hunt’s path that the IMF agent won’t find some way over, under, or around. His solu­tion: deprive him. First of his job, then of his wife, and then of his iden­ti­ty. It’s the ide­al pro/​antagonist dynam­ic for an action movie that’s been stripped down to its chas­sis in order to become the pin­na­cle of its series and one of the most engag­ing mega-bud­get action movies of the last 10 years.

Robert Bres­son famous­ly said, ​“One does not cre­ate by adding, but by tak­ing away.” JJ Abrams may not know the first thing about tran­scen­den­tal cin­e­ma, but he cer­tain­ly under­stands that less can be more. Like­wise, Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble III isn’t exact­ly the world in an hour-and-a-half, but it cer­tain­ly vis­its a lot of it.

Read our review of Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble – Rogue Nation

Spy movies are nat­u­ral­ly pred­i­cat­ed upon ques­tions of iden­ti­ty: pro­tect­ing it (think Army of Shad­ows, or of that fuck­ing NOC list from the first Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble film), obscur­ing it (Tin­ker Tai­lor Sol­dier Spy), or solv­ing it (The Bourne Ulti­ma­tum). Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble, from its roots as a tele­vi­sion series in the ​’60s to its cur­rent incar­na­tion as a glo­be­trot­ting block­buster action fran­chise, has remained keen­ly focused on fak­ing it. Usu­al­ly, that involves flaw­less per­fect masks and uncan­ni­ly per­fect voice mod­i­fi­ca­tion, but in Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble III, Hunt first relies on a more rudi­men­ta­ry form of decep­tion: domesticity.

The Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble films start tab­u­la rasa – Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble II ends with Hunt get­ting togeth­er with one girl (Nyah, played by Thandie New­ton), and Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble III begins with him engaged to anoth­er (Julia, played by Michelle Mon­aghan). He’s retired from the field, doing his best to sell him­self on the idea that the qui­et life doesn’t defy every fibre of being. But the sub­ur­ban dream is noth­ing but his lat­est and least con­vinc­ing mask; the shape­less­ness of being a spy is his one true identity.

For the agents of IMF, iden­ti­ty is prac­ti­cal­ly liq­uid, and ​“becom­ing” some­body else is as easy as using lasers to cre­ate a per­fect like­ness of some­one out of latex, break­ing into an exclu­sive par­ty at the Vat­i­can, spilling wine on your target’s shirt, sub­du­ing him in a con­ve­nient­ly emp­ty bath­room, and forc­ing him to read a poem that includes all of the phonemes and mor­phemes con­tained in the Eng­lish language.

To under­score that idea, Abrams crafts the franchise’s most clever visu­al effect: As Hunt is fit­ted into his Davian mask in the cat­a­combs below the Vat­i­can, the cam­era rest­less­ly piv­ots around the back of his team­mate Stickell’s (Rhames) head, set­ting up the expec­ta­tion that Cruise will be swapped for Hoff­man when the back­ground of the shot is obscured (like how Peter Jack­son tweaked the gram­mar of the typ­i­cal shot/​reverse shot con­struc­tion to lucid­ly illus­trate the Sméagol/​Gollum dynamic).

But that’s not where Abrams makes the switch. Instead, he does it in plain sight, using some fine dig­i­tal finesse to replace Cruise with Hoff­man – with­out cut­ting – while Rhames adjusts the jaw­line of the mask. The seam­less­ness of the tran­si­tion is only fur­ther empha­sised by how Hunt is talk­ing through­out, lec­tur­ing Stick­ell about how he’s going to set­tle down with Julia. His out­ward iden­ti­ty is as muta­ble as his under­ly­ing iden­ti­ty is fixed.

Davian, on the oth­er hand, is such a severe threat because there’s absolute­ly no dis­crep­an­cy between who he is and how he func­tions. He has noth­ing to hide. ​“Do you have a wife? A girl­friend?” It’s a point­ed threat, but it’s even more pow­er­ful as a boast – Davian doesn’t have any of these things, he doesn’t have any chinks in his armour. There is noth­ing to his exis­tence beyond what fac­tors in the action of this film. His iden­ti­ty is his untrou­bled by the win­dow cur­tains of a three-dimen­sion­al life, a fact that the film so vivid­ly depicts by omis­sion. Davian is a char­ac­ter at peace with the sin­gle-mind­ed­ness of his pur­pose, and Hoffman’s sta­t­ic per­for­mance – which achieves a near­ly bovine sense of emo­tion­al calm (just look at his expres­sion­less face in that shot where he’s being heli­coptered away from the Chesa­peake Bay Bridge) – makes that self-actu­alised clar­i­ty feel ter­ri­fy­ing­ly dangerous.

The shad­ow cast by Davian’s per­sona swamps the action scenes in a pal­pa­ble sense of pan­ic from. Dan­ger is some­thing with which Hunt is inti­mate­ly famil­iar, but the top­sy-turvy dis­or­der he feels as he fights back against Davian’s hench­men and then – as his pro­fes­sion­al iden­ti­ty is stripped away – tries to run from the IMF agents that have been ordered to bring him in, is com­plete­ly for­eign to this franchise.

It’s the same con­fu­sion we see in the pre-cred­its sequence, when Hunt can’t under­stand why Davian is say­ing that he doesn’t have the Rabbit’s Foot. This slob of a vil­lain, who rocks a blotched pur­ple stain on his chest for the brunt of his time on screen, allows Hunt to see his own reflec­tion through the grotesque dis­tor­tion of a fun house mir­ror. Hunt may be invin­ci­ble, but the peo­ple around him are not – his hap­pi­ness is his Achilles heel, and it’s more exposed with every step.

In a rare bit of car­ry­over, the Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble franchise’s fourth instal­ment would explic­it­ly prove that Hunt could nev­er keep all of his plates spin­ning, and that the man – like the heroes at the cen­tre of most major stu­dio movies – is just a job with a good hair­cut. After the third film’s dream-like fan­ta­sy of a final scene, in which Julia meets (and hugs!) Hunt’s team­mates back at IMF head­quar­ters and then embarks on her hon­ey­moon with her new hus­band, it’s clear why Owen Davian is such a bril­liant blank: he’s able to det­o­nate Hunt’s life so eas­i­ly because he knows full well that the best spies are always deceiv­ing themselves.