How about doing some research before making a movie?

Rating: 4/10 (9 July 2000)

I'm a big DePalma fan and I loved the first Mission Impossible despite what the critics and Jay Leno may say. The plot wasn't that hard to follow, the acting was great and Tom Cruise played a vulnerable though smart and resourceful agent named Ethan Hunt. He was involved in this huge mission with expert secret agents that weren't any worse than him, with the exception that they weren't the main characters and therefore the movie didn't focus on them that much. However, MI:2 or whatever you wanna call it is some bad spy flick which doesn't have anything to do neither with the first movie nor with the TV series. Ethan Hunt must be dead or something because the character Cruise plays only shares the name in common, for he's a completely different person. (Since when does a self-effacing character like him kill all the bad guys himself and work alone? All Ving Rhames and the other guy do is shoot from a helicopter. And now comes my biggest complaint. I'm Spanish and I've lived in Spain my whole life, so I do know what this country is like. I recall a James Bond movie with Roger Moore in which he goes to Madrid, which was nothing but a bunch of white houses with Mexicans (who must be fed up with Hollywood mistaking their country with the utterly different and boring Spain) leaning back against the walls and some ancient bus with a sign on it which said "Madrid", as if it was the only bus there was in the city. Apart from that film there are many other American movies which depict Spain as some third-world country full of South Americans, whom I respect a lot but who don't have absolutely anything to do with Spanish people. But these were all old movies and I thought Hollywood had learnt to do some research before setting a movie in a foreign country. I was, however, wrong. The first few minutes (after the climbing scene) take place in Seville which looks nothing like that kind of a Mexican "Hacienda" we see there. Sevilla is a city, and it looks just like Paris, Vienna or Rome. People wear regular clothes, they don't go around dressed up in those weird outfits shown in the movie which aren't even Spanish. (Some of them are, though, but from a different part of Spain)
I remember Anthony Hopkins saying that locals burn their saints as he looks out the window and watches some weird ritual which is supposed to be a "national Spanish feast". Then we see people dressed in real regional Sevillan costumes (but they're just regional though, people don't wear them on the streets, it's like those green costumes Austrians have), people dressed also in regional Valencian costumes (which would never be found at a Sevillan feast, since they come from up North) and some other folks wearing dressed that come directly from the imagination of the costume designers. Then we see them burning wooden statues of saints in a huge fire in the middle of a square, and they all move around like zombies. That doesn't exist!! People don't burn saints in Spain, and they don't walk around as if they were possessed by the devil. And the worst thing is that it's supposed to be a religious feast. Don't worry foreigners!! We don't do that, we're normal people just like you, that wear the same clothes as you do, live in buildings just like you and probably think like you!!!
Maybe the thing of the fire comes from a non-religious feast that takes place in Valencia every year where people light fire-crackers just for fun and there are spectacular fire-works. But it's just a show, that's all. Something for the tourists.
Then I was also surprised to see the supposedly locals speak with a strong South American accent with a touch of Arabic (Two beautiful accents that don't have anything to do with the Spanish one, and besides Arabic is a different language)and also not a single blonde or white skinned person. Hey, people in Spain are blonde, red-haired, brunette, etc. I myself am blonde. And we aren't dark-skinned (even though we try hard to be, since it's very sexy and fashionable skin color. To top it off, some of the sentences in Spanish the locals said weren't even right!!

Besides these comments on my country, I have to say some of the action scenes (like when Cruise goes into that building tied by a rope suspended from an helicopter) are great but the movie is nothing but non-sense and it's not "Mission impossible" at all. And I wanted Ving Rhames and the other guy to do more stuff, let alone the girl, whose being a professional thief doesn't seem to help her at all. Mr. DePalma, please come back!!