Is this supposed to be a joke?

Rating: 1/10 (27 April 2011)

Let's assume for a second that this was a parody. I had a few hard laughs watching this. John Woo is a king of parodies. He replaced Zucker brothers on the throne.
Unfortunately, it seems that Mission Impossible II is quite a serious sequel to Mission Impossible. And I must call it what it is - John Woo is king of crap.
First, the sequences take forever to execute - the guy is obsessed with slow motion. Then all at once the editing gets epilepsy inducing - way too fast and too disconnected for a viewer to realize what's going on. Too many closeups make you uncertain who is who. I've watched a "making of" where Woo's multiple camera setup was praised as ingenious... He shot Tom Cruise jumping onto a bridge on a motorcycle with more than ten cameras running simultaneously. It's not ingenious, it only shows that the guy is clueless about what he wants out of the shot. In that shot it took Cruise's character minutes to cover the jump that in reality takes three seconds. There were slow motions, there were repetitions from another angle and there was me yawning and pondering whether it's time to change the channel. And it goes like this through the entire feature. Be it a car chase or an indoor shootout or a beach hand-to-hand combat, it's always the same. A directing mess where a brilliant child of Hong Kong cinematography follows a simple rule: when you don't know what to put in - put everything in.
Woo also possesses no sense whatsoever when the line is crossed between outrageous and silly. Mission Impossible franchise is certainly not about realism. Alright, but Brian De Palma in first MI and J.J.Abrams in third knew how to handle the sensationalistic nature of the story and action. Woo lacks the sensibility. It must be a cultural thing. Maybe in China they see this as a serious work of art. I'd feel embarrassed just to try to put into words what Woo had the gall to put on screen.
I don't know how or why people take this guy seriously and how he keeps landing jobs in Hollywood. I mean it was obvious from "Broken Arrow" that the guy is a charlatan. So keep praising this "master of disaster", he's fooling all of you. He doesn't care about his movies. Obviously, because he puts very little thought in them.