This Is How We Do It

Despite its almost flagrant emptiness, MI3 has stayed with me, at least in some respects, and one thing that sticks out in my mind is how much it relies on well-established genre tropes to do pretty much all the narrative heavy lifting. In the best genre films, the ones that are real classics, genre is a shell wrapped around some larger idea, some deeper story, some emotional underpinning--something that has some significance. Most of the time, genre is merely used to dress up familiar tales of action and reaction. But in MI3, the genre shell is sturdy and thick, which is good, because it’s wrapped around absolutely nothing at all.

Try, for example, to figure out why any of the characters chooses to do anything. In nearly every case, you can’t. Tom Cruise returns to active duty not because of any event that pushed him toward that decision, but because that’s simply what the action here must do. Laurence Fishbourne plays domineering, gruff boss solely because of the demands placed on action film agency bosses. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s nasty has no stated motivation, no real goals—he simply is the bad guy, with all the slick cruelty that necessarily entails. The film even tacitly acknowledges this lack of motivation when Cruise thanks his team for being there for him at the end. Ving Rhames looks back and says, as if trying to answer why people keep on living, “Of course we are. That’s what we do.” And that’s all there is to it. That’s what action movie backup teams do. No more explanation necessary.

Even the traitor’s final explanation is almost a joke on the film’s utter lack of depth. He handily explains that he wanted to start war in the Middle East with utter flippancy, and no one bothers to deal with the ramifications of his pro-war, pro-nation building scheme because, as dramatic logic goes, it’s entirely irrelevant. He turned traitor entirely because the genre demanded that he do so.

The only time something resembling motivation shows up is when Cruise decides to grab the rabbit’s foot to save his kidnapped bride. But even this is hardly a dilemma. Cruise agrees immediately, without any sort of debate, because ultimately his character must agree. That’s what a hero does. The film knows this, and the film knows that we, as experienced genre viewers, know this. Why bother with pretending there’s anything really going on?