Movie Review: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III (2006)

NOTE: Like a Bruce Geller third act twist, I'm having a lot of technical trouble on this series. I don't know why my screen grabs are appearing squished. I'm trying to fix that, but wanted to go ahead and get this post up anyway for now.

After the first two films helmed by Brian De Palma and John Woo, respectively, the Mission: Impossible film franchise had established itself as a director’s series, attracting well-established auteurs and leaving them free to imprint their own style on the series rather than vice versa. (In fact, for better or worse, I can think of no example of another pre-existing franchise bending to the style of a single director than M:I-2.) In keeping with that tradition, major auteur David Fincher was approached to direct the third film. I’m curious what that would have looked like (especially after his bad experience working on another established franchise), but it wasn’t to be. After Fincher left, Tom Cruise (wearing his producer hat) and then-partner Paula Wagner decided to take a different approach. Instead of going with a well-established director, they’d take a chance on a bold new voice. That voice was Joe Carnahan, who had made a dramatic debut with Narc (2002), a movie Cruise came on board to executive produce. Carnahan’s Mission: Impossible III was all set to go with Kenneth Brannagh and Carrie-Ann Moss… but then it didn’t. The director famously quit the project. Still, Cruise seemed to like the idea of a fresh voice, at least theatrically. One weekend he binge-watched J.J. Abrams’ inventive ABC spy series Alias (of which Abrams had directed several episodes, including the spectacular pilot), and decided that despite having no experience directing feature films, Abrams was the man for the job. Thus the franchise shifted gears, and went from being a playground for veteran auteurs to a showcase for fresh voices, relatively new to live-action features. And in doing so, Mission: Impossible III established J.J. Abrams’ reputation as a director who could reinvigorate stagnant franchises… though always dividing fans. 

After Woo’s all flash, no character (or all style, no substance) approach to M:I-2, Abrams’ third entry begins with a pure character beat, signifying yet another change of direction for the series. Abrams had brought on two of his Alias writers with experience running their own spy series before that (Jack of All Trades), Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and together they set out to do with Mission: Impossible what they did weekly on Alias, and ground spy action in personal family drama. This approach makes a welcome change from the characterless action histrionics of M:I-2, but also presents its own set of problems. Namely, when it comes to TV origins, Mission: Impossible III feels more like Alias than it does like Mission: Impossible—which has never been a character-driven franchise. But the experiment works, to some degree, like those occasional special, personal episodes of the TV series that I enjoy so much.

That opening character beat comes when the movie begins in media res (a favorite technique of Abrams), and thrusts us into the middle of the drama without knowing how we got there. The scene finds our hero, Ethan Hunt (Cruise), going through all the stages of grief as the clear villain, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman, looking far more fit than he did in A Most Wanted Man), threatens the woman Ethan loves, Julia (Michelle Monaghan, fresh off of her career-launching turn in the brilliant Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). Davian wants to know the location of a MacGuffin called “the Rabbit’s Foot,” and Ethan denies, rages, and bargains for Julia’s life as the villain calmly counts to ten with a gun to her head. Then there’s a shocking gunshot, and we flash back to learn how everyone got to that point. It’s a very formalist script from there on in, and true to Joseph Campbell the hero rejects the call at first. (Which is kind of hard to do in the M:I format wherein he’s asked point blank to accept it!)

The IMF’s top superspy doesn’t want to go back into the field because he’s been domesticated. He’s living a peaceful life as an instructor for new trainees, complete with a beautiful fiancé, Julia (who believes he works for the Department of Transportation), and, when we meet them, a house full of friends and family. (Hers, not his. Apparently the mother and uncle Kittridge used as bait in the first film are no longer with us.) For Alias fans, it’s nice to see series regular Greg Grunberg among those friends. Even at home, Ethan’s superspy skills are still attuned, as demonstrated when he tunes into Julia’s conversation all the way across the room and surprises her friends by chiming in. But a whole movie of this would be pretty boring, so it’s no surprise when Ethan answers the phone and hears a recorded voice using a code phrase and instructing him to go to a nearby convenience store.

It is, of course, a personal thing that lures Ethan back into the field: an agent he trained, the first agent he deemed ready for fieldwork, Lindsey Ferris (a pre-Americans Keri Russell) has been captured by the man her team was investigating—Davian. An old IMF colleague and friend, now superior, John Musgrave (Billy Crudup) wants Ethan to lead the rescue operation. He leaves him a familiar briefing recording in a disposable camera to consider. It’s wheels up in the morning. Will Ethan be there? Of course—and in a nice homage to the Cruise classic Top Gun, he arrives on a motorcycle against the haze of dawn.

The IMF of Mission: Impossible III (whose headquarters is indeed hidden within the façade of the Department of Transportation) is a huge, sprawling bureaucracy where even the disembodied voices who record mission briefings have bosses. And even they report to some sort of upper management  (or board, or whatever) that seems to consist of at least ten people whose job it is to scowl and grumble at lowly field agents. This makes a stark contrast with what was presented as a fairly small division of the CIA in the first movie, and seemed to be fairly small in the second, too, seeing as the boss (Anthony Hopkins) could turn up in the field to provide his own personal briefing in lieu of a tape recorder. The agency may be unlike the IMF of previous films, but it’s very much like SD-6 (or the CIA’s L.A. field office) of Alias. Its head, Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne) presides over it like Ron Rifkin’s Arvin Sloan or Angela Bassett’s Hayden Chase, or Terry O’Quinn’s Assistant Director Kendall—whoever happens to be the yelly boss of a given season. Like his name implies, Brassel is the yelliest of IMF bosses, and this is not a man who would turn up in Seville for an in-person briefing, and unlike Hopkins’ character, seems to have no special regard for Ethan’s talents. There’s a whole tech division, of which resident nerd Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) is the star—basically filling the Marshall role from Alias. The office could even be one of the Alias office sets. All of this is illustrative of the larger picture in Mission: Impossible III: it’s basically a mega-budget episode of Alias, with Ethan as Sidney. It explores the same themes of a spy having to choose between work and personal life, except instead of Francie and Will, Ethan has Julia and her huge family and circle of friends.

Even the first mission of the movie, though undeniably spectacular, feels like an Alias mission rather than a Mission: Impossible mission. (Though Alias in turn, of course, owed a huge debt to the original Mission TV show.) Instead of masks and cons, it’s all miniguns (operated by familiar face Luther Strickel, played for the third time straight by the movies’ longest running co-star, Ving Rhames) and martial arts and shooting and exploding, and running around an abandoned warehouse—which, Abrams’ commentary track reveals, actually is actually a reused Alias location, from the pilot! 


But at least there’s a team involved, in true M:I style, and not just Ethan going it solo. Besides Rhames, the team includes Maggie Q (Nikita) as Zhen Lei and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (Damascus Cover) as Irish agent Declan Gormley. Both are likable and manage a good repartee, even if their characters are underdeveloped. Like Billy Baird from M:I-2, I’d love to see either or both reappear in a future series installment. 

It’s also great to hear this mission accompanied by strains of not only Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible Theme, but also his distinctive TV track “The Plot,” after a frustrating dearth of both in the previous film! Of course it’s no surprise that composer Michael Giacchino (another Alias alum brought on board by Abrams) is clearly a fan of Schifrin’s music, as he’d already demonstrated his deep affection for Sixties spy sounds with his brilliant John Barry pastiche score for Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (2004).

In stark contrast to Woo’s movie, this first action setpiece is distinctly character-driven (Abrams’ specialty). As the team flees the warehouse, having rescued Lindsey, in a Huey helicopter piloted by Declan, Ethan has to perform a medical operation on her. While he’s trying to charge his defibrillators, a pursuing Cobra attack helicopter gets missile lock on the team. The combination of extreme physical peril with human drama results in excellent, nail-biting tension more effective than any slow-motion, dove-filled explosion. And we feel Ethan’s torment when, in the midst of the chaos, he loses her. This failure deeply undercuts the team’s momentary elation at evading the Cobra through a field of windmills (which might, in keeping with series tradition, be a Hitchcock reference—to Foreign Correspondent).

Back at IMF Headquarters, Brassel yells at Hunt for things no reasonable boss would yell about, blaming him for Lindsey’s ostensible mission failure since it was Ethan who had deemed her field-ready, and demanding to know why on earth he let her on the helicopter while under fire in a breakneck chase on the mission whose sole objective was to rescue her… without first scanning her head for bombs. As if Ethan was supposed to predict that the villain would have a thing for implanting bombs in people’s heads via their noses just because it had happened on an episode of Alias!

The next setpiece in this mission will be a very traditional Mission: Impossible sequence, but before we get there, Ethan has some more domestic business to take care of. His moodiness after losing Lindsey and his sudden need to travel a lot for work has Julia concerned. He can't tell her what's up, but he asks for her trust. Then, to demonstrate he really means it, he proposes that they just get married on the spot, at the hospital where she works. And right there in the middle of a Mission: Impossible movie, Ethan Hunt gets married. He is now truly invested in these personal stakes. But as Luther tries to tell him, settling down isn't for spies. Somehow, it always falls to Luther to make sense of Ethan's romantic life. After he gives his friend a long lecture on all the reasons a spy should never get married and warns him that Julia will somehow be used against him, Ethan tells him they already got married. After a beat, Luther says, "Congratulations." Of course, he's perfectly right, and Julia will be used against Ethan—sooner rather than later.

Ethan, now firmly back on board thanks to feeling personally responsible for losing Lindsey, leads the team on their next attempt to find Davian and stop him from getting a doomsday device—that "Rabbit's Foot" we heard about in the cold open (it's impossible not to think of this entry like a TV episode), and amusingly never learn the true nature of. This attempt, in great spy fashion, will take place at a black tie benefit gala. And that gala happens to be at the Vatican... because why not? It's a great Mission location!

The Vatican operation really does play out like a traditional Mission: Impossible TV setpiece, and it's highly rewarding for fans of the show. It's a great setpiece with loads of classic spy trappings, accompanied by a great score. Declan creates a diversion by causing a traffic jam outside, enabling Ethan to scurry up the wall. Cruise then does his patented horizontal dangle coming down from the wall inside Vatican City. There's really no reason for belly-flopping into the courtyard like this, other than that the character has a history of it. While in M:I-2 another horizontal, Topkapi-style dangle felt like a tired and inferior rehash of the iconic moment from the first film, this time it feels like a winking, playful reference... and it's fun. After changing disguises, Ethan, in the perfect image of a priest, enters the Vatican itself.

Zhen, meanwhile, makes her splashy entrance in a gaudy (if awesome) orange Lamborghini and a spectacular red dress with flesh-revealing cutouts just perfectly appropriate for a day at the, um, Vatican. As in all the best Mission capers, every team member has a role to play. Zhen covertly photographs Davian's face with her compact camera, beaming the results to Luther and Ethan, lurking in the bowels of the Vatican, so they can 3D print the mask of his face. (And this was still a few years before 3D printing was a widely available technology!)

This is cool new mask technology on display (retaining the voice chipped Band-Aid from M:I-2, but further explaining how it works), but also very classic. Rollin Hand sometimes had to create on-the-go disguises like this on the TV show. Abrams builds suspense with the ticking clock of needing to make the mask before the real Davian enters the bathroom (driven there by Zhen spilling red wine on his shirt), and then throws in that classic Bruce Geller monkey wrench by having a bodyguard check on his boss before Ethan (wearing his Philip Seymour Hoffman mask) has managed to fully synthesize Davian's voice. The team eventually makes a rather spectacular escape, with the real Davian unconscious in their custody, involving the destruction of that Lamborghini, sewers, and a shot that's become sort of a staple of the series—the whole team, looking cool and collected, riding away in a motorboat.

Upon returning to the United States with Davian, Ethan and an IMF convoy are ambushed on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge causeway while transporting the prisoner. (Prisoner transports rarely go well in Mission: Impossible movies.) This was marketed as the film's signature action setpiece, but doesn't rank as highly for me as the Vatican sequence or a car chase to come in Shanghai. The causeway scene is too derivative. It plays like a cross between Clear and Present Danger and True Lies... with a dash of Licence to Kill thrown in. (It also prefigures a better, similar sequence in Fallout.) But it does bring us a few more impressive Cruise stunts, including a leap across a huge gap in the partially decimated bridge, and a leap from an explosion that's more impressive than it sounds owing to the obvious proximity of Cruise to the blast.

Ethan, of course, is blamed for this fiasco, because that's the way things work in Brasell's Alias-style bureaucracy. This time it goes beyond undeserved chewing out, and Ethan is instead trussed up like a cannibal complete with a Hannibal Lechter face mask. This raises a few questions, like why the IMF deems Ethan's mouth a bigger threat than his fingers (which naturally manage to pick the locks binding his hands with some help from his pal Musgrave), and how exactly the HR department manages to be so much more effective than any other in this enormous bureaucracy. Because my experience with large corporations is that it's very hard for anyone to even get fired with all the red tape and worries about discrimination suits. And I would think a government department would be even worse! One would imagine that a lot of paperwork needs to be filed in order to prove an employee was in need of a cannibal mask; otherwise the IMF would be looking at some potentially whopper lawsuits for wrongful restraint. Whether Ethan brings any action against his employers we never learn in the course of this movie, because Abrams wisely decides a more exciting course of action is for him to escape, go rogue (of course), and run off to Shanghai to find the Rabbit's Foot. Because now that Davian knows who he is, Davian (who is just plain evil) has naturally kidnapped Julia and used her for leverage, just as Luther correctly predicted would happen. But sometime during his flight, it must occur to Ethan that one of his bosses has to be a traitor for Davian's group to have found out where to intercept them. Is Brassel's incompetence actually a mask for treachery? Or is the mole Ethan's friend, Musgrave? It's an Ipcress File scenario, where one of the bosses must be bad.

In Hong Kong, the team helps Ethan break into yet another tall building. For a while you couldn't call a Mission: Impossible movie "the one with the skyscraper," because like saying "the Robert Ludlum book with the twins," that wasn't specific enough. Ethan broke into a skyscraper in M:I-2 by jumping from a helicopter. And, of course, the fourth movie easily made itself the definitive Mission: Impossible with the skyscraper when Ethan rappelled outside the world's tallest structure, the Burj Khalifa. So Mission: Impossible III is stuck in the middle, but for my money it's a more creative and thus more enjoyable sequence than the one in M:I-2. Instead of getting in by dangling (since he's already done that for this movie), Ethan gets in by using a fulcrum... or swinging from one tower to another. Sure, it's basically a variation on a dangle, but with more forward momentum, but it's fun to watch. (I also like that his team distracts the guards in advance by launching tennis balls at the building's glass roof.) There's then a pretty exciting bit where Ethan slides headfirst down the sloping glass side of the skyscraper, and even has to shoot some guards while he's sliding towards the perilous precipice, but what I really like about this particular break-in is that we don't follow Ethan inside. Instead Abrams keeps us with Declan and Zhen in a van outside, waiting to aid him in his escape when he base jumps out. They have a genuine tender moment in the midst of this ostensible action scene... only to be interrupted when Ethan, inevitably, comes bursting out of the building in the wrong place and several floors too low, his parachute blowing haphazardly and threatening to fold up on itself. 

There follows a great chase through the streets of Shanghai, first with Declan and Zhen in pursuit of the parachuting Ethan, and then, when the collect him, with Ethan (and obviously Cruise, for real) hanging out of the vehicle shooting backwards at a pursuing car. That's impressive, as is another bit where a giant tanker truck skids sideways over Ethan. It's pretty great action against a pretty great backdrop, and that combination makes it the best sequence in the movie for me. Of course, all this action has only gotten our man the Rabbit's Foot; it hasn't saved Julia. For that, Abrams introduces a scene that will become a new staple of the series: the Long Run.

It could be argued, I suppose, that Ethan's doom-fraught dash through the streets of Prague in the first movie, trying and failing to get to each team member before they're killed, is a Long Run. But it's in too many different directions, with too many different stops along the way. So I'd call it a precursor at best to what Abrams sets up: a sequence in which Cruise needs to run at full bore for a great distance, always moving forward, inevitably against a ticking clock of some sort and ideally with Benji in his ear telling him where to go. This one ticks all those boxes, as Benji, back at headquarters because he is not yet a field operative, directs Ethan as he runs through residential Shanghai neighborhoods to the location where Julia is being held.

While this exciting run is followed by another fist fight (a fairly dull yet all too common ending to M:I movies), this one at least isn't bogged down by the unnecessary flipping and senseless slow motion that hampered Ethan's fight with Ambrose at the end of M:I-2. Instead this is a gritty, nasty throw-down with Davian. Philip Seymour Hoffman may have never actually been a physical match for the always athletic Tom Cruise, but he's a good enough actor that he certainly manages to convince us he is! His performance (reminiscent of his turn in Punch Drunk Love) is just so full of palpable menace that I damn well believe it each time he knocks Ethan down. (The odds are also evened a bit by the fact that Ethan has just run who knows how many blocks and—oh yeah—had one of those nose bombs implanted in his head!) Davian isn't a particularly well-developed character (he remains a cipher, albeit a brutal one), and doesn't even have a lot of scenes in the movie, but Hoffman so thoroughly occupies the ones that he is in that he easily becomes the series' best villain to date. (A record I'd say he probably still holds, though Rogue Nation's Sean Harris at least comes close.)

Despite being a civilian, Julia proves herself a remarkably competent and capable heroine when she basically saves the day after being saved by Ethan. Ethan actually dies for a little while in this movie, and Julia not only manages to (eventually) revive him, but also to slay quite a few more villains (including the turncoat IMF superior) in the time while he's dead! There's a brief moment in Mission: Impossible III where we get to glimpse her hanging out with the whole team (including Benji), and at the time it seemed to portend more... but sadly that wasn't to be, and her character was obviously taken in a different direction.

If M:I-2 suffered from an overabundance of style from a director who was ridiculously self-assured, Mission: Impossible III suffers from a relative lack of style from a director who's just discovering his. Abrams can tell a story like nobody's business (on its own enough to elevate the third film well above the second one), and he's good with character and hence good with actors (much better than Woo on this front), eliciting fine performances from all involved. But he's not (or at least wasn't at this point in his career) a master of building elaborate action scenes. Mind you, he's not bad at it, either, but most of the action direction feels a tad perfunctory. Used to television and having to stretch a small budget, he tends to rely heavily on close-ups during chase scenes and fights that require the camera to occasionally stand back and let the audiences get their bearings. Even simple conversations over-rely on close-ups, cutting from one face to another as dialogue is spoken (again, standard for TV), and rarely giving us a two-shot with both characters in focus at the same time. That said, the editing is good, and the shots are at least reliably steady and never so jerky (like all the imitation Greengrass stuff we see in this genre) that we can't tell what's going on. And I definitely prefer this sort of action to overwrought slow motion. But it would take another movie for us to get back to truly spectacular action where you can always tell who's where. And Abrams' palette is as cool as Woo's was warm, but just as monotonous. I did get a bit sick of blues and greens. 

Overall, Mission: Impossible III is a major step in the right direction. It's more of a team movie, with a few more nods to the TV show than the second movie had. It's got a great score that once again makes ample use of Schifrin, as any M:I score should. And it's got legitimate character development. But it also gets a bit bogged down in that character development. Ethan isn't Sidney Bristow. Audiences don't want to see him torn between action and home life; they just want to see him performing ever more impossible stunts! Abrams did exactly what he knew how to do expertly at that time. He delivered a terrific big-screen Alias movie, with the cast of Mission: Impossible. But even if that formula doesn't make for a perfect Mission, it proved the perfect stepping stone from which both the franchise and Abrams were able to reach stunning new heights.

The DVD and Blu-ray feature a surprisingly in-depth half-hour making-of. Sure, it’s largely EPK footage of people congratulating each other, but it’s also a fly-on-the-wall look at J.J. Abrams’ first feature directing experience. It shows how a lot of the stunts were done, what things were miniatures, and reveals that that Berlin factory where they rescue Lindsey is actually the same building where the pilot of Alias was shot! It's also worth noting that the documentary ends with a  piece of music not found in the movie that uses the Mission: Impossible theme. That's a rap with M:I-related lyrics called “Self Destruct” by Kid Beyond. I can’t find any information about this bizarre track online! With lyrics mentioning, “Retinal scanning procedure” and a chorus that goes, “Get ready for the self-destruct," it has more to do with the series than a lot of the pop songs on the second film's soundtrack.

There are also five short deleted scenes. Most are from the Berlin factory sequence, and it's easy to see why Abrams decided to cut that down and keep things moving quickly through the movie's first action scene. But one scene between Cruise and Crudup proves to be a pretty substantial omission, whose inclusion would have improved the movie's plot. Another shows a lot more of Maggie Q and her Lamborghini (never a bad thing!), which not only provides more eye candy, but also explains how her character gets into the Vatican, something resolved (somewhat confusingly) off-screen in the film.

The commentary with Abrams and Cruise contains many surprising revelations, like the fact that the famous Philip Seymour Hoffman dialogue in the opening scene (that was featured heavily in the film's marketing campaign) was originally shot as Eddie Marsan’s dialogue. Then they realized that it had to be Hoffman speaking and reshot it. Marsan's part became tiny, but it was definitely the right decision because it helps make Hoffman such a great villain. 

Mission Report
TV Moments: Loads—mostly from Alias, though, instead of Mission: Impossible! (Ethan's disguise as a priest does seem vaguely reminiscent of Martin Landau in the episode "The Cardinal," however.)
Dangling: There’s a classic horizontal dangle as Ethan descends the Vatican wall (winkingly acknowledging its own superfluousness, as opposed to M:I-2’s blatant and inferior copying)
Rogue Agents: Yes, it’s pretty clear that one of Ethan’s IMF bosses—Musgrave or Brasell—is a turncoat... sort of an Ipcress File situation.
Rogue Ethan: For sure. Locked up like Hannibal Lechter on nonsense charges by Brasell, he escapes to save his wife and somehow convinces his whole team to go along with him on this unsanctioned, personal mission.
Fashion Alert: Either the 2000s wasn’t a decade of particularly egregious trends, or we’re still too close to realize what was wrong. Happily, Ethan never sports an Ed Hardy T-shirt and neck tattoo, anyway!
The Long Run: Ethan has to run across most of Shanghai as the clock ticks down on Julia, and Benji directs him via cell phone.


Buy Mission: Impossible III on Blu-ray on Amazon.

Read my review of M:I-2 (2000) here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible (1996) here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Seventh TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Sixth TV Season here.

Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Fifth TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Fourth TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Third TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Second TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The First TV Season here.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Person of Interest: The Complete First Season

TV Shows On DVD reports that Warner Home Video will release Person of Interest: The Complete First Season on DVD and Blu-ray/DVD combo sets on September 4th. The CBS show, produced by J.J. Abrams and Jonah Nolan, is basically The Equalizer meets Batman... and that's pretty cool. I still find star Jim Caviezel (the 2009 Prisoner remake) and his Batman voice kind of hard to take, but the show's got enough going for it that I can get past that. Besides, co-star Michael Emerson (Lost) is awesome. Caviezel plays a former CIA operative looking to atone for his shadowy past by helping the helpless (those with the odds against them) with the aid of Emerson's tech billionaire, who controls a massive surveillance network that can predict what people will be involved in violent crimes. Extras on both sets include an unaired extended pilot episodes with audio commentary as well as a commentary track on the broadcast pilot, a gag reel and the featurette "Living in an Age of Surveillance." The 6-disc DVD set will run you $59.98 retail, and the 10-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo set (which also includes Ultraviolet digital copies) is just a bit more at $69.97. Of course, both are available to pre-order for less on Amazon.

Tradecraft: Paramount Acquires Period Spy Thriller For Bad Robot

Deadline reports that Paramount has optioned a spec script by Patrick Aison called Wunderkind for J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot production company. Abrams and Bryan Burk will produce. According to the trade blog, "Wunderkind is an elevated two-handed action thriller set in the 1970s following a young Nazi hunter with the CIA and an older Nazi hunter working for the Mossad. The two become reluctantly intertwined in their hunt and shocking twists result." I hope this gets made. I'm always pleased to see Cold War-era spy movies hit the screen, and last year's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy proved that the Seventies is a particularly rich era to mine in that genre.

Nikita Renewed; Missing Cancelled

Good news for Nikita fans! Deadline reports that despite low ratings, the CW has renewed the Maggie Q assassin drama for a third season. I'm very happily surprised. The pick-up comes despite the fact that Nikita has averaged lower ratings than Ringer and Secret Circle, two shows the network did cancel. Additionally (and far less surprisingly), CBS has renewed the hit J.J. Abrams/Jonah Nolan Equalizer-meets-Batman drama Person of Interest, starring Jim Caviezel as a former CIA operative now using his specialized skill set in the private sector (for eccentric billionaire Michael Emerson) to prevent violent crimes and atone for some of the damage he may have caused during his spy career.

Unfortunately, with the good news comes bad news for fans of current spy television: TV Line reports that ABC has cancelled Missing, arguably the best network spy show since Alias. That's really too bad, because Missing has only gotten better since its pilot (reviewed here), and I've been thoroughly enjoying the top-notch action and fabulous European locations week after week. On top of that, Ashley Judd made a much better spy than I ever would have guessed, and the supporting cast is also first rate. Hopefully the first (and only) season will wrap up with a satisfying resolution of some sort. At least the DVDs have already been announced, so spy fans will be able to enjoy this single season for years to come. It's definitely one I'll re-watch from time to time. ABC has also officially cancelled its Sixties-set spying stewardess drama Pan Am. There had been some hope that show might live on despite low ratings in America (which led to it being pulled from the schedule a while ago) because it's very, very popular overseas. (In fact, it just received the coveted Rose d'Or award in Switzerland!) That always seemed like a long shot though.

Fall Spy TV Preview: Person of Interest Debuts Tonight

The fall spy TV season kicks off tonight with the J.J. Abrams/ Jonah Nolan collaboration Person of Interest at 9/8c on CBS. Jim Caviezel stars as an ex-CIA agent recruited by Lost’s Michael Emerson to use his skills for a very private intelligence operation. Expanding a theme from Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Emerson spies on the entire city of New York with 24/7 access to footage from every security camera in the city. In a Minority Report-like SF spin, he has a computer that analyzes all that footage and gives him the name of someone likely to be involved in a violent crime. Conveniently (for the narrative, if not the do-gooders), the computer apparently doesn’t have the capability to predict how the individual in question will be involved—whether the name represents a victim or a perp or a witness or what. It’s then up to Caviezel to use his CIA skills (and a large arsenal) to stop the crime. Caviezel proved a less-than-compelling lead (to put it nicely) in AMC’s misguided remake of The Prisoner, but I’m willing to give him another chance. The grey in his hair suits him in the previews, and it will be to his benefit not to have to stack up against Patrick McGoohan. He might have the equally unenviable task of measuring up to another Sixties spy star, however, since this former-spook-turned-NYC vigilante setup has undeniable shades of the Edward Woodward action drama The Equalizer… Emerson I’m a fan of, as I am of Abrams and Nolan, so I’m looking forward to giving this series a chance.

For all the spy show development we followed over the past year, relatively few of the shows mooted actually ended up on the fall TV schedule. The highest profile title was definitely Fox’s Exit Strategy, which starred Ethan Hawke as the Jim Phelps-like (he wishes) leader of an elite IMF-like team of spies called in by the CIA when a mission goes badly. Feature director Antoine Fuqua (who worked with Hawke in Training Day) helmed the pilot, and the red-hot team of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci produced, which I would have thought would make the show a lock for a pick-up. That was before I read the script for the pilot, which was unfortunately awful. Apparently Kurtzman and Orci did their own re-write after the draft I read, but I guess it wasn’t enough for Fox. Maybe it got better, though. At some point I’ll probably review the unaired pilot.

The spy series that did make it (representing a very small fraction of all those that were bought, developed or even shot) include Person of Interest, Homeland (24 producer Howard Gordon’s new CIA drama starring Claire Danes, which premieres on Showtime October 2 at 10) and Pan-Am. The latter debuts Sunday night at 10/9c on ABC. I didn’t even realize that the Sixties-set stewardess drama had an espionage angle (involving some of the sexy stews being recruited by the CIA) until the reviews started mentioning it… usually in conjunction with a phrase like “awkwardly shoehorned.” Nevertheless, that got me excited to tune in!

The best spy pilot script that I read was for ABC’s Missing, a sort of female version of Taken starring Ashley Judd as a former CIA agent who heads to Europe to tear down the Eiffel Tower if she has to in order to save her kidnapped son. (See what they did there, with the gender switching?) Despite the derivative plot, the pilot script was fast-paced and exciting and delivered pretty much everything I want out of a weekly spy show, including genuine foreign locations. Missing was shot on location in various European cities including Prague, Istanbul (where Taken 2 is set) and Dubrovnik. Adriano Giannini (son of Mathis actor Giancarlo), GoldenEye villain Sean Bean and Colombiana’s Cliff Curtis co-star. While a world premiere for Missing’s pilot was recently set for the industry confab MIPCOM in October, ABC has yet to set a date for broadcast. So I’m guessing we won’t get to see it until mid-season.

In the meantime, development has already begun for next year’s potential shows, and there might be even more spy pilots in the works than there were for the last season. Just scan through the last few days’ news items, and stay tuned for more later today.

Person of Interest premieres tonight, Thursday, September 22 at 9pm Eastern
Pan-Am premieres Sunday, September 25, at 10pm Eastern
Homeland premieres Sunday, October 2, at 10pm Eastern (though the pilot is already available to watch for free now on Showtime's website and On Demand from certain cable providers)

Person of Interest Extended Trailer

A Yahoo! Fall TV Preview today just called my attention to a video that's been out there since May, but I hadn't seen before. Here's an extended preview for J.J. Abrams' new CBS series Person of Interest, about an ex-CIA agent (The Prisoner's Jim Caviezel) recruited by a reclusive billionaire (Lost's Michael Emerson) to use his unique skills to wage a private war on crime, Equalizer-style. The duo are aided by access to an ECHELON-like database of all the security camera footage in New York and a computer designed to detect patterns in the footage that predict crime. If that set-up sounds familiar, you're probably recalling a similar situation from the third act of Christopher Nolan's Batman opus The Dark Knight, and that's not a coincidence. Person of Interest was written and co-produced by Jonathan Nolan (Christopher's brother), one of The Dark Knight's screenwriters. I think it looks pretty awesome, and fortunately Caviezel looks much better in this preview than he was in that laughable Prisoner remake. Person of Interest debuts Thursday, September 22 on CBS.

Person of Interest Trailer

CBS has released a short preview (via io9) of their freshly picked up J.J. Abrams/Jonah Nolan show Person of Interest, which stars Michael Emerson (who was so great as Benjamin Linus on Lost) and Jim Caviezel (who was so bland as Six on the disappointing remake of The Prisoner).  Caviezel stars as a presumed-dead CIA agent recruited by a reclusive billionaire (Emerson) to use his spy skills to wage a vigilante war on crime in New York... before it happens. Up until that last Minority Report twist, it basically sounds like The Equalizer (ex-spy uses skills to fight crime in NYC) meets Batman (self-financed billionaire wages war on crime). The Batman connection is no coincidence, either. Person of Interest comes from the team of J.J. Abrams (Alias, Mission: Impossible III, Undercovers) and Jonah Nolan, brother of Christopher and co-writer of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.  The pre-crime aspect seems from the clip to be an expansion of a concept Nolan first explored in The Dark Knight: the use of a network of security cameras to invade citizens' privacy for their protection.  It's a theme also explored on contemporary UK spy series like MI-5 (aka Spooks), as CCTV cameras are a way of life in Britain.  It's hard to get a sense of a show from these partly behind-the-scenes upfront clips, but the premise and the people involed have me intrigued. My primary misgiving, though, is Caviezel.  In The Prisoner, he just proved too dull to be a leading man.  Hopefully he approaches this character differently.  Personally, I would have rather seen Emerson paired again with his Lost co-star Terry O'Quinn as ex-spies in Odd Jobs, but sadly NBC didn't feel the same way; the new regime pulled the plug on that potential Abrams show.

Tradecraft: Jim Caviezel Stars in Yet Another J.J. Abrams Spy Pilot

Lest you fear that there would be no J.J. Abrams-produced spy series on the fall schedule after the failure of Undercovers, take heart: of course there is.  And this time it's created by The Dark Knight co-writer Jonah Nolan, brother (and frequent collaborator) of Christopher Nolan. 

Deadline reports that that Jim Caviezel will star alongside Lost's Michael Emerson.  Hopefully Emerson's unbridled charisma (creepy charisma), which was on full display throughout Lost, will be enough to make up for Caviezel's utter lack thereof, which was on full display throughout the 2009 Prisoner miniseries. 

According to the trade blog, Person of Interest "centers on  ex-CIA agent Reese (Caviezel), presumed dead, who teams up with reclusive billionaire Finch (Michael Emerson) to prevent violent crimes in New York City." So... it's like The Equalizer (or Burn Notice) with unlimited funding?

Tradecraft: Undercovers Terminated

So much for that additional script order we just heard about. Deadline reports that NBC has cancelled the J.J. Abrams spy series Undercovers.  I doubt anyone will miss it too much.  I've been a dedicated viewer from the start, watching every episode (actually I'm one behind, but it's on the DVR), and as the closest thing to a devout follower that I can imagine the show has, I know I probably won't give it a second thought.  The show just never clicked.  Sure, I like it.  I like it enough to watch it, but I'm pretty easy that way when it comes to spies.  I don't like it enough to miss it.  I enjoyed the pilot and thought the show had promise, but sadly it never lived up to that.  Hints of an overall conspiracy involving Samantha's sister and the real reason the CIA reactivated the Blooms have remained just that: hints.  Which is pretty frustrating five or six episodes in.  And, sadly, the writers still haven't figured out how to successfully play off the romantic and spy angles of the series in a way that generates either suspense or sexual tension.  And they continue to desperately try to sell us on these two characters being deeply in love by just showing them having sex in the first scene of every episode (well, technically showing them either about to or just after; this is, after all, a family show airing at 8PM!) instead of using the tried and true method of giving them witty, flirtatious banter to exchange, a trick that's served Hollywood well since its Golden Age. I have little doubt that lead actors Boris Kodjoe and, particularly, Gugu Mbatha-Raw would have any difficulty pulling that off if they actually got decent banter to wrap their tongues around, but they haven't.  The best aspects remain the comic relief supporting spy cast members Ben Schwartz and scene-stealer Gerald McRaney. (The guy who played Leo never clicked at all and threw off the stars' chemistry, but his absence last week would seem to indicate that the producers realized that.)

Undercovers' cancelation marks a rare strikeout in the spy genre for J.J. Abrams, who co-created the series, co-wrote its first two episodes, co-wrote the theme music and directed the pilot.  He'd previously been batting 1000 in the espionage milieu, having created Alias and directed Mission: Impossible III. Luckily, Abrams already has more spy projects in the pipeline, including a fourth Mission: Impossible movie, which he's producing, and another stab at an NBC series.

As for Undercovers, all thirteen episodes of the initial order will be produced.  The trade blog reports that the twelfth is currently before cameras.  According to Deadline, "The series will stay on for the next 2 weeks and will air its last original (for now) on Dec. 1. It was already set for a preemption on Nov. 24 when NBC is airing a DreamWorks Animation holiday special. The fate of the remaning original Undercovers episodes is unclear."  They'll probably be burned off on Saturday night or filling in temporary gaps in the network's schedule, I imagine.  But even if they never air, I have little doubt that Warner will release "The Complete Series" on DVD soon enough.  And of course I'll buy it. 

Tradecraft: NBC Gives Chuck Full-Season Pickup, Orders More Undercovers Scripts

Chuck fans have long learned to live always on edge, wondering when the axe might drop on their favorite series and they might have to spring into action and eat a lot of Subway sandwiches or organize rallies and letter writing campaigns to save their show.  Well, now they can rest easy!  (Until May anyway, when we have to worry about renewal for another season.)  Deadline reports that the network has given the series a full season order for this year. After an initial 13 episode order for Season 4, NBC has now given the greenlight to an additional 11 for a complete 24-episode season.  Meanwhile, the network has also commissioned four additional scripts for J.J. Abrams' Undercovers despite that show's unimpressive ratings.  Hopefully those scripts will make it to production.  And hopefully they mark some of those improvements I wished for in my review of the pilot.  I'm still enjoying the series, but it could really stand a little bit of character development. 

Tradecraft: Anil Kapoor Joins M:I-4

Here's some more Mission: Impossible 4 news for you today!  After seeing the first images of Tom Cruise dangling in this outing a few hours ago, word now comes from Deadline that Anil Kapoor has joined the cast in an "integral supporting role."  Kapoor is probably best known to spy fans for playing President Omar Hassan on the final season of 24, though wider audiences will know him better from his role as the gameshow host in Slumdog Millionaire.  (And Bollywood fans will no doubt know him better still for a whole lot of titles Western audiences have probably never heard of.) In addition to Tom Cruise, he joins a very impressive cast that includes Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Josh Holloway, Michael Nyqvist. Vladimir Mashkov and possibly French actress Lea Seydoux (Inglourious Basterds). Brad Bird (The Incredibles) is directing and J.J. Abrams (M:I-III, Alias, Undercovers) is producing. The fourth Mission: Impossible film (which we learned probably won't actually be called "Mission: Impossible 4") is currently filming in Prague.

First Dangling Shots From New Mission: Impossible Movie

It wouldn't be a Mission: Impossible movie without some dangling, would it?  What tight, complex, multi-layered cons were to the TV series, dangling is to the movies–ever since Brian De Palma borrowed a famous scene from Jules Dassin's Topkapi for the first Mission: Impossible film.  (Since then it's become a famous Mission: Impossible scene instead of a famous Topkapi scene.)  Anyway, a Belgian newspaper, HLN, now provides (via AICN) our first glimpses of Tom Cruise's IMF agent Ethan Hunt doing any new dangling–bare-chested dangling no less.  In Prague!  But I don't think the dangling itself will actually be in the J.J. Abrams-produced, Brad Bird-directed Mission: Impossible 4 (or whatever it ends up being called). Instead, this rig appears to be for a stunt, and all wires will no doubt be removed in the final product.  Still, for now it's Ethan Hunt dangling, so that counts for something.  Not as much as say, Jim Phelps changing his facial expression, but it still counts for something.  Head over to HLN to see a whole gallery of shirtless dangling images. (Just click the "volgende" link to move forward.)

Click here and here to read more about the eclectic cast of Mission: Impossible 4.

Tradecraft: More M:I-4 Casting

Last week we heard that Michael Nyqvist would play a villain in Mission: Impossible 4; now comes word from The Hollywood Reporter that Josh Holloway (Sawyer from Lost) has also joined the cast as another member of the Impossible Missions Force.  That's more like it!  So much for all that talk about this one being a "two-hander" instead of a team movie; with all these team members it's got to be at least somewhat of a team movie...  Anyway, if they're looking for hot young stars to counter what Paramount apparently perceives as Tom Cruise's fading appeal, I think Holloway will bring more potential star appeal to the table than Renner, who is an excellent actor, but seems a bit less likely to bring in the ladies. 

TV Review: Undercovers Pilot (2010)

To be honest, I was expecting very little of Undercovers, NBC’s new romantic action series about married spies. True, it’s J.J. Abrams directing (and co-writing), which is a rarity on TV these days (now that he’s a fancy-schmancy film director), and it’s J.J. Abrams directing spies, which usually warrants outstanding results. (Alias pilot, anyone?) But the print ads were boring (I liked James Hibberd’s dismissal of the campaign in The Hollywood Reporter: “Let’s have a dangerous espresso!”), the extended trailer shown at upfronts was dull, the regular trailers looked unoriginal, and for the most part reviews were negative to lukewarm. So I went in with very low expectations... and I actually kind of enjoyed what I saw. (Don’t stop reading now, though; there are some huge qualifiers coming up ) Is it as good as Alias? Certainly not. Is it as good as Mission: Impossible III? No. Is it... good? Um, well, no, not really... but it’s still entertaining (especially if you have a very high threshold for what entertains you when it comes to spies, which I do), and sometimes entertaining is more important than good. This is a lighter-weight fluff than we’ve ever seen before from J.J. Abrams. It’s so derivative (including from his own Alias) that you literally know everything that’s going to happen before it happens. There are no surprises. And I kind of like that. I’d call it a guilty pleasure except that both words feel a bit extreme: it’s not bad enough to prompt any guilt, but it also probably won’t generate that much pleasure in most viewers.

Other than Alias, the shows that Undercovers feels most derived from are 80s shows: Remington Steele, Hart to Hart and, to my personal pleasure, Scarecrow and Mrs. King (review here). These shows were also light and fluffy and certainly aren’t critical milestones, but there’s really nothing else like them on TV anymore, so I found the totally unoriginal Undercovers fairly refreshing. It is to those romantic adventure shows what Human Target is to the male-dominated action hours of that era, like The A-Team or my favorite 80s television series, Magnum P.I.: not as good, but good enough to evoke nostalgia. So I don’t mind Undercovers’ lack of originality, but it does have some other faults that can’t be as easily excused.

What passes for a romantic plot often gets in the way of what passes for the spy plot. For example, the couple risks exposing themselves by pausing for what’s supposed to be a sexy dance in the middle of their mission. One might expect a writer of Abrams’ caliber to use that moment to inject some conflict between the characters’ romantic and professional goals, and have the romance-based decision cost them on the spy front. He doesn’t, however; they’re not exposed and they don’t pay for their choice at all. Instead, all the audience gets out of it is a dance–and not even a very good one. As far as big spy dance scenes go, these two can’t compare with Sean Connery or even Arnold Schwarzenegger and their respective tango partners Worse still for a romantic spy comedy, while the leads generate decent chemistry, their dialogue fails to sparkle like the exchanges between Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan or Kate Jackson and Bruce Boxleitner. For this series to work, they will require some genuine banter, not lame jokes about “sexpionage” (a word that Abrams and his co-writer Josh Reims seem to think that they made up–and also seem to think is much funnier than it is–which, here, is not at all). “You look pretty hot yourself” simply doesn’t cut it as romantic repartee; the writers of Undercovers need to brush up on their Thin Mans if they want to figure out how to generate genuine romance between married adventurers.

Undercovers’ Nick and Nora are Steven and Samantha Bloom, played by Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. (Nice try, guys, but it takes more than alliterative names to equal Mr. and Mrs. Charles!) They met and fell in love while both working for the CIA, but quit the secret agent biz because they worried that the secrecy and deception would be bad for their marriage. Five years later they run a successful catering company. What is J.J. Abrams’ obsession with attractive black women running catering companies and restaurants? Remember the fabulous first season episodes of Alias, and how the only really boring parts were when the show cut away to Sydney’s friend Francie trying to start–and later running–her own restaurant? Did you ever say to yourself, “I wish there were a whole show just about Francie’s restaurant?” No, nobody did, but that’s almost what Undercovers gives us. Luckily, we’re mercifully saved by the appearance of 80s TV vet Gerald McRaney (Simon and Simon).

McRaney shows up as a grizzled, all-business career CIA agent, Carlton Shaw (great name!), and implores the two former agents to return to the fold. His deadpan delivery alone is nearly enough to grant this series a season pass on your TiVo. McRaney only gets a few scenes in the pilot, but he’s awesome in them and steals the show out from under its leads. They hem and haw and refuse and then, as you already know from the trailers, they both turn up at his office independently and behind the other’s back. When they realize they were each thinking the same thing, they say yes, they’ll take him up on his offer and spy again. (His office, by the way, is one of those CIA offices based in sunny SoCal that bothered me so much on Alias. It just makes me thankful once more for Covert Affairs, a spy show actually set in Langley and Washington!)

As soon as the spy couple are back in the game, we get the genuinely horrible opening title sequence: clips of them in action in the middle of a spinning wedding ring. The ring then somehow turns into the "C" in UnderCovers, the title itself in a particularly bland and generic–if shiny–font. It could easily be lifted straight out of the 1991 married spy series Undercover (no "S"); it certainly doesn’t look any more modern than that. But you know what? I’m going to cut the show some slack on this front, too. As with its premise, I found the dated nature of its titles kind of charming.

The spy hijinks are the usual stuff: breaking into a bank in Madrid, jumping out of a plane to infiltrate a wedding (huh?), then revealing themselves to be wearing a suit and dress, respectively, under their jump suits like Sean Connery in Goldfinger, getting into fights on Paris rooftops. Not one sequence will surprise you, but they’re all slickly directed by Abrams–particularly Kodjoe’s Parisian roof battle. You can see everything coming in both the spy plot (“Are they aware of the real reason they’ve been reactivated?” “No!”) and the romantic plot (“How do you know so much about this agent we’re supposed to be saving?” “Because we used to date!”) I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

What works well is the comedy. Bits with a comic relief backup agent named Hoyt (Ben Schwartz) who hero-worships Steven but ignores his wife could have so easily played as grating, but Schwartz and Abrams somehow make them hilarious. The lackey constantly compliments Steven throughout the mission, both in person and in his ubiquitous earpiece. (“Great work with that camera, Mr. Bloom!”) He also runs through a catalog of Steven’s past successes (he’s studied his file), and he’s particularly impressed by “the Senegal incident.” (“Are you a robot? Are you half robot?”) Between Schwartz and McRaney (who manages to maintain the dignity of his character while providing top-notch comic relief–even when not wearing pants!), the comedy angle is well covered, which is a good thing in a show this lighthearted.

The production values are also praiseworthy. I’m sure even J.J. Abrams didn’t really fly around the world to film this pilot, but he did find good locations and mixed them well with stock establishing shots to at least achieve this effect. If it’s the old Alias “Burbank as Barcelona” routine, then it’s handled very well. In a variation on the Alias captions introducing each city its spies visited, the foreign locales on Undercovers are introduced with a whole CGI postcard image listing their names in two languages. It’s not quite as effective as the cool place names in Quantum of Solace (one of the very few areas in which you’ll ever catch me praising that movie), but it does the job well for television. These postcards are of course accompanied by raps in whatever language/dialect is appropriate to the locale, which is the new favorite cross-media method of establishing a foreign location for American audiences.

The finale comes in Moscow–in a warehouse, no less–of course–and the bad guys shoot a whole lot of rockets around that warehouse without ever injuring (or even really posing the threat of injury to) our main characters. Samantha grabs one of the rocket launchers for herself and shoots it out of a taxi she’s stolen while driving, exploding a fleeing villain’s car but naturally not killing him. If that’s not the modern equivalent of Scarecrow and Mrs. King (pretty much the same exact scenarios, simply upping the ante in the armament department), then I don’t know what is. The espionage, it should probably go without saying, is also on about the same level of realism as Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Which is to say, not at all real. This is pure fantasy–even moreso than Alias, and that had actual fantasy in it!

In the end, it’s set up so that the Blooms can still have their catering company, but also work for the Company on the side, taking on assignments that the CIA can’t afford to be officially associated with. This freelance arrangement gives Abrams the scenario that he strived for in the first season of Alias but ultimately abandoned: a chance to explore spies balancing personal lives with secret ones. That’s not a very fresh notion anymore, and Covert Affairs is handling it much better than Undercovers at the moment, so if this show somehow makes it to another season, I’d expect Steven and Samantha to probably become full time spies again. (Although I doubt Samantha’s annoying sister will end up shot dead on the kitchen floor and replaced by a deadly double. This really isn’t that sort of show!)

You can predict everything that happens on Undercovers before it happens (you just know the bad guy is going to shoot the henchman who delivers him bad news...) and the show delivers no surprises. But as I said in my intro, I sort of like that. It’s like watching a favorite movie, where you know all the scenes already, or singing along with a favorite song when it comes on the radio. It’s comfort food. And in that regard, even though it’s exactly like plenty of spy shows that have come before it, it still manages to be unlike anything else currently on the air. If the writers manage to make the currently tepid romance sparkle a bit, and better integrate it with the action (ideally creating at least a bit of non-rote conflict between the lead characters’ romantic and professional ambitions), then it might even grow into a great show in its own right. The voiceover announcing, “Here are scenes from next week’s Undercovers” at the end embodies the tone of the show fairly nicely. “If anyone asks... you haven’t seen them.” It’s an old joke, but it still works. If that appeals to you, give the show a try.