Sub-Woo effort, but better than the first one.

Rating: 2/10 (3 June 2000)

Robert Towne wrote this thing? And he wrote Chinatown? What serious brain illness is he suffering from? This is a seriously misguided effort that tries to turn Tom Cruise into James Bond. It waste the usually scene-stealing talents of Ving Rhames. After seeing Dougray Scott seethe menacingly and ineffectively I'm glad he didn't get the Wolverine role in X-Men. Only Thandie Newton breathed any fire into her role as a sexy double-dealing agent. And of course even a subpar effort by director John Woo is always interesting. There is some terrific action here, but we've seen it all before. The movie rip-offs the astonishing Face/Off and he excellent The Matrix (which rip-offed Woo for great effects). It substituted loud music for real suspense and I'm getting sick of stop/quick/slow/jagged motion editing effects. But above I didn't care who lived or died and the story sucked. Of course I'm writing this with Titanic on the tube playing on HBO for the 1000th time.
MI:2 is slightly better than Broken Arrow.