The George Lazenby of the Twenty-First Century

Rating: 4/10 (28 June 2006)

"Mission Impossible 2" borrows many of the traditional elements of the trusted formula which proved so successful in the James Bond series. There is a secret agent hero, a psychopathic villain bent on world domination, a beautiful heroine, exotic locations (Seville and Sydney), a "McGuffin" which the hero and villain are trying to get hold of and the obligatory car chases. The hero is Ethan Hunt, an operative for a highly secretive US government agency. The villain is Sean Ambrose, a renegade member of the same organisation and the heroine is Nyah Nordoff-Hall, a professional thief and (in a typical Bond-like touch) Ambrose's former girlfriend. The McGuffin is a lethal virus developed by a corrupt pharmaceuticals tycoon and which Ambrose is trying to steal along with the antidote so that he can hold the world to ransom. Although the hero is an American, the villain, heroine and Hunt's boss (equivalent to Bond's "M") are all British; Nyah, despite her exotic name and looks, speaks in the tones of an English public schoolgirl. Nyah and Hunt become romantically involved; a rare example of an inter-racial romance in an American film.
The film, however, lacks certain essential ingredients of the Bond formula. The Bond films, at their most stylish, are distinguished by a lightness of touch and a careful balance between excitement and humour. "Mission Impossible 2", however, takes itself completely seriously and has very little humour. Connery, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan all interpreted James Bond in their own ways, but he always emerged as a rounded, believable character with his own personality. Tom Cruise's Hunt, by contrast, comes across as devoid of personality, comparable only with Bond as interpreted by the inert George Lazenby. Dougray Scott does his best with Ambrose, but he does not emerge as a particularly memorable villain in the Bond tradition. Thandie Newton, who was so impressive in films like "Flirting" and "Jefferson in Paris", seems wasted as Nyah.
This is the only one of the "Mission Impossible" films that I have seen, and it has not inspired me to go to the video store to rent the original or to the cinema to see the recent "Mission Impossible 3". It has confirmed some of the doubts I had about Tom Cruise. In his early "Top Gun" or "Cocktail" period he seemed a handsome but shallow matinée idol but then matured into a very good actor in intelligent films like "Rain Man", "Born on the Fourth of July", "A Few Good Men" and "Eyes Wide Shut". Unfortunately, he has also shown a tendency to act in some ill-advised vanity projects, often with himself as producer, and these have rarely shown him at his best. Thus we had the interminably dull "Far and Away", the virtually incomprehensible "Vanilla Sky" and "The Last Samurai". This last was not my favourite film, largely because of Cruise's overacting and its regrettable and historically ignorant tendency to glamorise Japanese militarism, but at least making an epic set in the Japan of the 1870s showed a laudable ambition to go beyond Hollywood's normal range.
"Mission Impossible 2", by contrast, shows no ambition at all; it is just a bog-standard shoot-em-up action adventure of the sort that Hollywood's lesser talents can make with their eyes closed. If Mr Cruise must indulge himself in vanity productions, he should find something worthier of his talents than trying to become another Schwarzenegger or Segal. He should certainly set his sights higher than becoming the George Lazenby of the twenty-first century. 4/10