Film: not that impossible!

Rating: 6/10 (25 July 2006)

Wow, that was lame -- even for me. I'm so sorry.
John Woo bravely takes on this second installment of the Mission Impossible trilogy and the end product is a fast-paced, mildly entertaining but completely decent action thriller. It hardly outshines Mission Impossible I, nor does it even fully do it justice -- but it is a solid film that welcomes Tom Cruise back as spy Ethan Hunt on another near-impossible mission for his..uh, agency (?). This time he is to retrieve and destroy a supply of a genetically engineered disease called "Chimera", and using his newfound sweetie (Thandie Newton) as bait, his quest is shadowed by personal concerns.
OK, so Mission Impossible II is -- like its title -- a tad predictable and seems to want to make up for its lack of clever twists by introducing specialized masks that the characters wear and whenever it gets too predictable, they simply pull off this mask to reveal A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT identity! This borders on silly and desperate as the film progresses, but damn, it's still quality. After all, it is full of gems like Ethan effortlessly picking up a 600 pound motorcycle with one arm, and Ethan swinging his entire body weight from one cliff to the other, again using only one arm!
Dougray Scott is a superbly sexy villain but Thandie Newton (of the horrorshow "Crash") simply does not deliver, but rather relies on a cute face and a demure smile. It appears that John Woo has picked up on Newton's non-talent in this role and desperately tries to compensate for it with a big, overblown, wailing, ethnic score in the background whenever she attempts a dramatic performance. Embarrassing.
Other than this, seriously people, what's the big deal? Or is this simply a combination of 'betrayed' fans of the first film and Tom Cruise-haters giving all of his films a "1"? It deserves more than a 5/10 rating on IMDb because it truly is very entertaining as an action film, balancing depth and violence in a way that, I thought, could not be done better with its script.
6/10