Entertaining Enough But Entirely Different From The First Movie

Rating: 6/10 (17 September 2003)

The original MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movie by Brian DePalma was too complicated for its own , so the producers of the sequel have decided to go the other way and give us a film with a wafer thin plot with MTV style visuals ( Lots of sexy slo mo with an intrusive soundtrack ) from John Woo , in short if you liked the DePalma version you`re positively going to hate this one . Tom Cruise`s hero seems to have had a personality transplant since the first film . Remember in the original he lived on his wits ? Well in the sequel his soul seems to have been taken over by Jean Cluade Van Damme , he`s able to do back flips while dishing out a good kicking to bad guys , I`m telling you compared to the hero in this movie Neo from THE MATRIX is a cripple !

A special word of mention to Dougray Scott : I was very pleased when it was announced that the villain of MI2 was going to be played by a Scotsman , and after seeing his performance I was killing myself laughing . Can there be anything less menacing than someone with a Scottish brouge screaming " STOOOOOOOOOP . PUT A SOCK IN IT " ? Scott gives a laughably bad performance , but an enjoyable one . In fact the whole film is enjoyable despite being an extremely shallow popcorn movie with lots of explosions and car chases . I much preferred this to the first film .
Oh and Tom Cruise did all his own stunts ? Yeah right