MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2000 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
If there's anything to be learned from "Mission: Impossible 2" it's that, contrary to popular belief, machine guns really aren't all that dangerous.
I can't for the life of me remember how many times magazinefuls of bullets are unloaded at our spry hero Ethan Hunt, yet he simply ducks, dodges, grins, and returns fire as if there were no tomorrow.
Unfortunately there IS a tomorrow, and it's arrived in the form of a very unnecessary follow-up to a very poor big-screen version of a great '60's television series, aka "Brian De Palma mucked up the first one; now let's watch John Woo muck up the second."
Woo, the man responsible for such masterful Hong Kong actioners as "A Better Tomorrow," "The Killer," and "Hard-Boiled," has style--that cannot be denied. But substance? "Mission: Impossible 2" contains some of the most inane dialogue ever uttered on the silver screen. How about "I'm not going to lose you" sobbed to a cute one-night stand? And remember the fantastic cleverness of the original TV series so blatantly absent from the first "MI" movie? Well it's even more absent here. Second time around, the only plot twist is the ol' rubber mask removal trick which happens at least five times until, frankly, it's lost ALL of its appeal.
Of course, Tom Cruise is super dreamy even though his incessant grinning grates on the nerves of not only the arch villain (played by Dougray Scott, the handsome prince to Drew Barrymore's Cinders in "Ever After"). In fact, Tom grins throughout the ENTIRE first act until his boss, played by the gracefully-aging and uncredited Anthony Hopkins, makes some crack about this not being Mission: Difficult. Harrumph!
But come on. This film has NOTHING whatsoever to do with "MI"-the television series. Bruce Geller's creation boasted intricate, sophisticated plots that wowed you with their gadgets and complex ingenuity. Once the facts were on the table, the mission--should Jim Phelps (now Ethan Hunt) and his allies choose to accept it (they invariably did)--truly did seem impossible to pull off. The mission in "M:i-2" is to hire three people, make sure one of them is Thandie Newton, and recover a stolen virus named Chimera. Now how impossible is that?
Newton, of course, provides the sexy love interest and she performs this task admirably. The other two agents are Ving Rhames, who knows how to use a computer, and some Australian guy who knows how to fly a helicopter. So far this sounds like Mission: Piece o' Cake. Scott, as the villain, is refreshingly wholesome--and perfectly decent--but even he gets stuck in too many obvious situations. How many films have you seen in which the bad guy threatens to neaten the tip of someone's pinkie as if it were a slim Cuban panatela?
If the only problem with "M:i-2" were its sparkling lack of originality, then audiences might still find some enjoyment in the interminable action sequences. But even these are lacking Woo's trademark sophistication. There's gunfire a-plenty, but it all seems rather noisy and unchoreographed. Tom and Dougray engage in a motorcycle showdown in which they race at each other at 100mph, leap from their mounts, collide in mid-air, wrestle each other to the ground, and STILL find the energy to kick each other in the head for fifteen minutes. This was easily the film's funniest scene, according to my pre-teen daughters.
Likewise, the scariest scene is when Thandie injects the virus into her own arm--"I just wasn't thinking!"--and the dumbest scene is when Dougray shoots his own henchman without first checking to see if he was wearing a Tom Cruise mask. And to think Robert Towne ("Chinatown") wrote this screenplay.
It's never boring, but "Mission: Impossible 2" might well be the silliest movie you'll see this summer.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
Got beef? Visit "La Movie Boeuf" online at http://members.dca.net/dnb
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews