What Went Wrong, Woo?

Rating: 6/10 (10 June 2000)

The first half of Mission Impossible 2 was somewhat promising--an elegant thief and a handsome hero work together to prevent an impending viral debacle. The movie, however, quickly decomposed into a senseless series of big explosions and flying objects.
Woo is an exciting director, but the carelessness with which most of the action scenes were filmed/edited was at first disappointing, and as the movie progressed, increasingly hilarious. Bad guys fire wildly into the air and then fall in seemingly-unrelated fits onto a spark-filled floor. There was even a point when I began to wonder if I should pretend that this was a movie about superheroes so that my overstimulated brain could make some sense of all the flying . . . .

Tom Cruise is too good-natured to be a shallow-minded action hero (I just wanted to pinch his cheeks), Thandie Newton was beautiful and enjoyable, and the bad guy (Scott) was good. The rest of the cast could have been replaced by motion-sensing worker drones without much affecting the substance (!) of the movie. Sadly enough, I still enjoyed it . . . .