Review of Mission: Impossible II (2000) by Halfwelshman — 03 Jan 2012

I can see Tom Cruise and the other producers' logic when they hired John Woo to direct Mission: Impossible II - getting a big-name action director to helm the second installment of a big-name thriller franchise makes complete sense.

Unfortunately, what John Woo turned M:I-2 into was an English-language Hong Kong action movie, and not a good one. At times his direction of the action scenes borders on self-parody, and I'm not certain Woo has noticed.

We get it John, you like your wire-work, your slow-motion jumping-through-the-air-whilst-shooting, but I think I speak for the vast majority when I say we'd much rather see Chow Yun-fat doing it in Hard Boiled or a Better Tommorrow and looking cool than Mr.

Cruise doing it in this knockoff and looking pretty damn silly. On the subject of the pocket-sized actor, in the first film, Cruise's Ethan Hunt was a character you could get behind - despite his **** he was likeable, his motivations understandable, but this time round he's just a smug, self-indulgent douchebag (putting it mildly), and his hair is stupid.

I could write a whole page on the hair in this film - with all the slow-motion shots of hair billowing in the wind, it's like a Loreal ad! Concerning the rest of the cast, Thandie Newton is irritating as the love interest, Dougray Scott and Richard Roxburgh make bland villains in comparison to the baddies in the first film, and Brendan Gleeson and Anthony Hopkins should be ashamed by appearing in the film at all, brief though their time on screen is (i swear Hopkins only said yes to have something to do between scenes in Hannibal).

Thank goodness for Ving Rhames, who reprises the role of Luther Stickell the effortlessly cool hacker - he's still an incredibly fun character, but just isn't on the screen for long enough. Even after all these gripes, my main problem with M:I-2 is the decision to make a novelty of the first film a major plot device in this film.

Yes, I'm talking about the ultra-realistic face masks people use when they need to look a doppelganger of someone else. It's a lazy and unconvincing concept for a plot element, and you always see it coming.

Plus it's never explained why people's eyes aren't a different colour. Mission: Impossible II has completely lost the fun factor of the first film. Yes, the action scenes are just as big, if not bigger, and exceptionally competent, but Woo's direction is lazy and with too much tendency to reference the infinitely better films he directed in the 80s and 90s.

The performances are lacklustre, the script laughable, and tone extremely uneven. It's not quite the worst action film I've ever seen, but I can find little that's right with the film, and a whole lot that's wrong with it.