My Name is Hunt, Ethan Hunt

Rating: Null/10 (28 July 2000)

You cannot enjoy this movie if you are an aficionado (like I
am) of the TV series. What made the success of the TV
series was the quiet and steady method used by Jim Phelps to accomplish the mission he chose to accept. Action scenes were kept at a minimum to enhance the suspense and illustrate the clever plot. Both movie versions of Mission: Impossible are far away from the TV
series. I guess Tom Cruise wanted to do a 007-like movie
and he came out with the idea of re-modeling Mission: Impossible for this purpose.
MI2 contains all the ingredients of a James Bond movie:
The super-spy himself who works alone (Cruise), his boss
M (played here by Anthony Hopkins); Q, the hardware guy
(Ving Rhames is the alter ego of the late Desmond Llewelyn); the Bond girl (Thandie Newton who strangely
reminded me of Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment); and
last but not least the car and motorcycle chase scenes.
The analogy goes as far as Nyra asking Hunt : "Who are
you?" and the reply comes naturally: " My name is ...".

Both movie versions of Mission: Impossible contain a strong and powerful message: All spies are villains. In both
movies the evil man is a member of the IMF team. I wonder
what made Anthony Hopkins have confidence in Tom Cruise if (almost) all his spies are potential traitors! I
guess we will have to wait for MI3 to find out.
The action shots of the movie are well done. The exaggerated slow motion (c.f. Matrix) is there to clearly
show us that it is Tom Cruise himself who is doing the
stunts. Even the cliche of having the villain wake up (after
he was believed to be dead) to deal the final coup to the
hero is used to illustrate the prowess of Cruise as a stuntman.
All in all, it is a good spy movie with a simple plot and a lot
of action. It surely has nothing to do with Mission: Impossible.