What a MASSIVE disappointment!!!!

Rating: 2/10 (25 May 2000)

Mission:Impossible 2 arrives in theaters with a thud. A noisy, preposterous boom, which is louder than any of the generic car crashes, bomb explosions, and gunfights, contained in the movie itself. I would've never thought to consider the original Mission: Impossible as a good or even marginally good movie, but compared to this installment, the 1996 film is a masterwork. We can only hope that Tom Cruise and his co-producer Paula Wagner decide against adding onto this completely joyless series. John Woo takes over for Brian DePalma as director of this big-budgeted turkey which I implore you not to but a ticket for.
After an opening sequence that gives hope to the audience, even as it leaves us feeling unusually empty, the film almost completely runs out of steam before the halfway point. This time around, taking the NOC-list's place is some stupid virus named the Chimera that could wreak all sorts of havoc on the world. Topping off Cruise and Company's obstacles are the villains: a corrupt ex-spy (Dougray Scott) named Ambrose and his gallery of inept goons as well as the bigwig pharmaceutical company president (a wasted Brendan Gleeson). Not even Anthony Hopkins, in a totally wasted unbilled cameo, can entice us to not be annoyed. Maybe Hopkins had an idea how bad the film was going to be and took his name off it.
Then come the unintentional laughs. And I cannot believe that a talent machine like Cruise, mixed with the usually dependable Woo can actually deliver unintentional laughs. But the sight of a white dove leading the way for Cruise as he walks through a blasted-open doorway was almost enough for me to get up and watch Road Trip again. At least that film had action.
What the film does have going for it is the always-reliable Cruise and his love interest, Thandie Newton. The excellent Ving Rhames gets next to no screen time and had better become a leading man soon before he gets stuck playing uninteresting sidekicks (see the first M:I, Out of Sight, and Entrapment). It's strange to think that a John Woo-directed film would have a love story as the only real attention-grabber, but Newton is completely ravishing and her chemistry with Cruise (doing his usual smirking and staring) is moderately successful. Yet even this love story is recycled from Alfred Hitchcock's classic Notorious. Other plot twists, if you could even call them that, I found myself guessing minutes before they happened. The amount of genuine thrills in M:I-2 are almost equal to that of five seconds of Frequency (released earlier this spring- see it if it's still around).
Which brings me to the lack of originality in M:I-2. Not only is the romantic plot lifted from a film made almost 50 years ago, but also the action sequences in the movie feel insipid and totally unfresh. We get carbon copy John Woo martial arts fist fights and shootouts by. John Woo. In the first M:I, there were a couple of decent thrill sequences (i.e. the safe break-in, the train climax) yet walking out of the theater, I couldn't think of one exciting situation in the whole M:I-2 film. Never before has slo-mo been so completely drained of its worth (which isn't much to begin with). Also, is Woo blind? We get what seem like thousands of close-ups of our stars in the first half-hour alone. Most of his film work just seems rehashed and distracting here, which may be what happens when you put two inflated personalities together in what they both think is their own film.
God save us from M:I-3 because we, the moviegoers, deserve more than absolute junk like this. How could so much time, money, and talent be spent on such an unentertaining, inane, and completely disjointed film?
GRADE: D-