Mission: Impossible 2

viewed May 26, 2000 at St. Petersburg, FL

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In his fourth American feature John Woo tries to infuse his trademark aesthetic into a Hollywood franchise -- and gets halfway there.  The acrobatic battles with men and bullets, which Hollywood has ripped off Woo for the past decade, are present, and somewhat more enjoyable coming from the original.  What's missing is the crisis of a man's values being challenged in the face of violent transgressions against family and honor -- the emotional charge that lifted his films with Chow Yun-fat as well as Face/Off above the normal action fray.  Here, M:I-2 is burdened by a clunking attempt at having Cruise's Ethan Hawke care deeply for a basically untrustworthy person.

Cruise is engaging in his tried-and-true arrogant way but you don’t believe for a minute why he would be attracted to Thandie Newton and vice-versa.  They never pinned down what Hawke's set of values were or what his investment in Newton's character was.  They have a joyride together and almost die except that he saves both of them.  The near-death experience causes them to fall into each others arms in bed -- thus an emotional bond is created that lasts through the rest of the movie and its vicissitudes of fate.  Come on.

Newton's character affords a lot of potential for intrigue and uncertainty, but she plays it straight as Hawke's woman for the whole movie, as if to overcompensate for the surfeit of double-crossings in the previous MI (both films were scripted by Robert Towne).  Even if we were to buy that, Hawke's attachment to Thandi Newton should then not be one of love, but of honor.  Perhaps some lust could clutter his clear-thinking mind, so that he's not sure how or whether to trust her as a lover or an ally, or better yet whether to trust himself.  Instead he puts her into the arms of her old flame, the man he is trying to catch -- a hollow evocation of the same set-up in Hitchcock's Notorious, with none of the emotional complexity.  I actually find the Limp Bizkit song on the film soundtrack more emotionally complex.

The action is fairly satisfying but none of it is memorable: it lacks the brilliantly delineated scenarios of DiPalma’s MI: the high-wire burglary of the soundproof room is one of the most brilliantly conceived sequences of action film history.  180 degree panning shots of Tom Cruise high-kicking his opponents are kind of cool -- but we've seen them before, even in video games.  The film as a whole is harmlessly pleasing but disappointing by Woo's standards, especially for how unmemorable it is -- as quickly consumed as the gallons of oil they set ablaze during one of the fight scenes.

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