Woo scholars, rejoice

Rating: Null/10 (7 June 2000)

When you see a French Clown of Death dancing on the hood of a vintage renault, you're probably watching a Truffault film. If you're watching death play chess with a knight errant for the latter's remaining hours, you're watching a Bergman. When you see a terminal piece of crap oozing with delightful romantic misunderstandings, you know that Nora Ephron has made another film. And when you see a white dove fly in slow motion through a wall of flame and gunfire, what can you be watching but a John Woo film.
In a very short period of time, Woo has become the most imitated director in the world. Films as varied in quality from the Matrix to Killing Zoe employ scenes, characters, and stunts that have long been a staple of the growing Woo archetype. Those in "the know" - that legion of geeky, parents' basement-dwelling, Dungeons & Dragons-playing, philospher-kings that own bootleg copies of The Killer in Cantonese - know that when some cracker hack with a steady cam makes an action film in the United States, it will inevitably contain a scene that they aped from a Woo classic.
With that in mind, it is an increasingly jarring experience when a new Woo film is released that is actually directed by John Woo. One enters the theater with an air, rare anymore, of the penitent entering one of those stone cathedrals in which Woo loves so much to film. It can only help, although only marginally, that in this, his fourth Hollywood production, there is nary a whiff of Travolta, Slater, or Van Damme.
Mission: Impossible 2 is the quintessential John Woo film. It occupies a space beside Hardboiled, The Killer, A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2, Face/Off and Bullet in the Head as one of a continuing string of genre-defining action films. The story concerns Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, top agent of the Impossible Mission Force, tracking down an international terrorist (Dougray Scott) who has stolen a priceless vaccine for an artificially created super-virus. Along the way, Cruise falls for a stunning Thandie Newton playing a super-thief sporting a romantic history with Scott's baddie. The plot centers around the efforts of retrieving the vaccine while containing the virus.
If you don't get Woo - you probably won't get the film. Without a healthy background in Woo-isms, a few things may strike the casual viewer as a bit odd. With that in mind, I've included a small glossary.
the seemingly unmotivated slow-motion exposition - when an American director films something in slow motion, he does so to show an important prop that will be pivotal, no doubt, in future action. When Woo does it, he's talking about that first glance that stretches, the moment when a villain and a cop discover that they are soul-brothers, that eternal instance in macho-lore where the gun and the hand speak the poetry of life and death. Huzzah!
the flying dove/pigeon - when a Western director films a pigeon or dove in flight, they're filming something in Venice or Paris. When Woo films a dove in flight it is always in the seemingly unmotivated slow-motion exposition highlighting a pause in a ferocious firefight during which the duelists take stock of themselves, the positions that they are in in relation to life and to nature - the absurdity of the dance that they have not choreographed, but are helpless to complete.
the death of innocents - when a Western director films an innocent bystander getting shot during a firefight that does not involve them, they are filming a belligerent ethnic cabbie that deserved the bullet for getting off the boat in the first place. When Woo films an innocent bystander flitting off to his final reward, he is asking the audience "is this not our fate? To laugh or be the laughed at? To shoot or be the shot?" In its essence, Woo posits Niezche's Ubermensch among the weak and the venal. Asses are kicked.
the bizarre and stilted dialogue - When a Western director films bizarre and stilted dialogue, they have made the terrible and lamentable error of hiring Joe Esztherhaus - when Woo films bizarre and stilted dialogue he is saying "I am filming Opera. Spoken Opera sounds odd, does it not?"
the two-handed pistol-packing - When a Western director films his hero brandishing a gun in each hand, sliding across a floor, rolling and tumbling, and blasting away, he is stealing from John Woo. Woo is the first director in modern cinema to understand that a gun is not only an extension of a man's penis, it must do things that a man wishes his penis could do. And there must be two of them.
the Bergman Persona shift - When a Western film has a hero that identifies with the villain, that hero is a brilliant FBI agent/investigative reporter/grizzled detective/behavioral psychiatrist that "gets in the mind" of the bad guy to track him down. When John Woo has a hero that identifies with the bad guy - sometimes he actually becomes the bad guy (Face/Off). More importantly, the good guy always has a moment when they realize that they are actually behaving just like the bad guy but something, fate perhaps, has made them the good guy. Also, in Woo, you not infrequently see the bad guy and the good guy cooperating in some capacity to foil, or at least delay, the eventual victory of one over the other.
There are hundreds of Wooisms - these are just the most consistent and prominent. Know these Woo-isms and your understanding of the poetry of M:I 2 improves immeasurably.
I believe that it's important to take a moment here to comment on Tom Cruise's alarming lack of sexual chemistry with any of his romantic leads post Risky Business. He has a vaguely weasel-reptile quality that makes his midgety good-looks more distracting than sexual. Imagine a car-salesman faking an orgasm and you're halfway to imagining the extent of Cruise's lack of sexual charm (he can not be held responsible in Top Gun, however. In Top Gun Kelly McGillis' noggin is so much larger than Cruise's dimunitive coconut that one is in eternal and mortal fear that she will actually consume him praying-mantis style - it is a problem that continues in the execrable Titanic in which the gigantic Kate Winslet looks as though, at any moment, she's going to wolf Leo down with a crumpet and a spot of tea). It doesn't hurt the film however, as any student of Woo knows that women are just the scarves that bind the hero and the villain in that eternal West Side Story scarf and knife fight.
Just as last fall's Galaxy Quest is the best new Star Trek film in decades, Mission: Impossible 2 is the best new James Bond film in decades. Luckily for the free world, it's also the best new John Woo film since Hardboiled in 1987. Know the zen - see it twice.