Mission Impossible III (2006) – Analysis

In the wake of the publicity for the upcoming Mission Impossible 4, I thought it would be relevant to do an analysis of Mission Impossible III.  Part III starred Philip Seymour Hoffman as Owen Davian, an international black market arms and weapons dealer.  Spy and espionage films are often the best forms of fiction that function as windows into real plots and intrigues, and Mission Impossible is no different.

In fact, Tom Cruise’s central character, Ethan Hunt, is based on spy mastermind, E. Howard Hunt.   Hunt confessed a few years ago to being involved in the JFK assassination, laying the blame at the door of LBJ.  The “Cigarette-Smoking Man” of X-Files fame also appears to be loosely based on E. Howard Hunt: both are involved in high-level assassination plots, including the assassination of JFK and MLK in the X-Files episode “Musings of a Cigarette Smiking Man.”  Both are known for authoring novels under pseudonyms, too.

In Mission Impossible III, however, Hunt is in his usual role of  heroic super-agent.  Davian has kidnapped one of Hunt’s trainees, and injected her with a detonatable microchip, and upon rescue the chip detonates.  She warns Hunt of the “invisible man” and that the overall plan is an “inside job.”  Where have we heard that terminology before?  The plot then indicts the Vatican in dealing with Davian, and the IMF team has to infiltrate the See to kidnap Davian to keep him from obtaining the “rabbit’s foot,” which is said to be an anti-matter sort of compound, later identified as “anti-God,” which bring to mind the Angels & Demons plot of Dan Brown. Read more of this post