Pity the Middle Child

Rating: 2/10 (25 August 2007)

It's been said that the middle child often has more adjustment problems than the other two. In film trilogies, even unintended ones like I suspect the MI franchise of being, the middle film often falls short of either the first or the last. A classic example is Back to the Future II, which was as dark and repellent as I and III were attractive and whimsical.
MI:II is the film to avoid in this trilogy. MI was intriguing in its exploration of the classic film question "What if?" What if Jim Phelps had tired of always being the underpaid civil servant and gone for the gold? Brian De Palma develops his answer in a wonderfully nuanced and compelling way. The scene in which a resurrected Jim tries to film-flam Ethan Hunt is delightful. As Jim describes Kittridge, the alleged force behind all the violence, as tiring of his 60K yearly salary, his rotten marriage, and his obsolescence, Ethan realizes Jim is describing himself and everything falls into place. The later chase aboard the TGV is almost believable.
Hardly anything is believable in MI:II. Worse than that, the plot is derivative in the extreme. Besides recapitulating Hitchcock's Notorious, director Woo draws on Star Trek for the opening scene in Moab.....Terminator II for the shootout in the Biocyte lab.....Star Trek again for the infected person who needs the antidote.....Terminator II again for Luther blowing up cars with huge cannon shells. The love triangle is an old one that wastes Thandi Newton's considerable talent. The motorcycle chase near the end reinforces the too-widely held perception that all riders are psychotic yahoos.
Still, the film is OK for what it is: A third-rate shoot-em-up. The photography of Australia isn't bad, either.