Mission: Predictable

Rating: 4/10 (30 May 2000)

Boy, what a disappointment. I expected so much more from a potential blockbuster. The plot concept for the mission is good. But the movie breaks down from there. The movie was directed by John Woo. Director of "Face/Off", John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. "Hard Target", Van Damme, "Broken Arrow", Travolta and Christian Slater. This movie was so bad that I considered walking out and waiting for my friends in the lobby. A lot of the sentiment is way to action movie cliche. There is no real intrigue that you would expect from a deep cover spy movie. There is about five minutes of character development, and those five minutes were laughable. In fact, the whole movie theater did laugh. In fact, there was a lot of laughing during the movie. The rest of the movie was a heavy visual effect movie. Not like Star Wars visual effects, rather just a lot of "eye candy". It was a lot of unbelievable stunts, car chases and martial arts fighting. From that respect it had a bit of a "Matrix" feel to it. But even The Matrix had better plot and character development. Don't go see this movie and expect to see anything like that last one. Some of the characters are the same. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt and Ving Rhames returns as Luther Stickle. But this movie is all about Ethan Hunt. Rhames' character is very minor, and is nothing more than a snapshot of the Luther that we first met in the train car in the first movie, not the man he had become by the end. He's all attitude and one liners. Anthony Hopkins, who plays Hunt's boss is only in the movie very briefly, and even he is nothing but attitude. I guess that's how I would sum up this movie: attitude and fighting. But that's it. The characters in the movie are two dimensional puppets that Woo uses to show some cool fight scenes. I wouldn't really recommend the movie at all, but if you want to see it, wait for the $1.50.