Dumb formulaic action movie

Rating: 3/10 (21 April 2006)

I was quite impressed with the first Mission Impossible. I half-expected a dumb Hollywood remake with some obscure references to a TV show I have never seen, but what I got was a semi-intelligent entertaining and spy movie with quite a few twists and surprises.
I was actually quite eager to see the sequel. When I heard John Woo was directing MI2, I thought - great, instead of a good spy/action movie I will get a slow-mo fest with car wrecks and pigeons. Was I right? Unfortunately, one hundred percent.
MI2 looks and feels like a 2-hour recording of a video game. Pretty people (people in question mainly being Cruise and his love interest) run, drive, shoot and generally do acrobatic things, almost half the time in slow motion. There is a generic action movie plot (villain steals thing X to do a dastardly thing Y and our hero has to stop him while THE CLOCK IS TICKING) right out of a B-action movie starring Steven Seagal or Michael Dudikoff, or an episode of Action Man cartoon series. No real team-based action, no spy angle, nothing. Just Cruise selling his hairspray commercial smile before doing some acrobatic stunt which should kill an average men ten times over.
The flick really goes for the lowest possible denominator. No effort is spent into putting some logic or thought into the plot. The "rubber mask" shtick is so overused it is painful to watch. The action scenes never end, bullets, crashes and explosions are non-stop, yet the main characters never even get bruised. I could proceed but you get the point - this is a dumb formulaic action movie that uses every cliché in the book and isn't even entertaining.
John Woo is a director with one trick up his sleeve and is seriously overusing his welcome. Tom Cruise obviously just wants us to watch his pretty face. Together they created a movie that is hardly worth seeing it for free, let alone paying for it.
3/10