Mission Impossible Mate

Rating: 2/10 (13 June 2000)

Hi folks, Ok let's start with the Good: The rock-climbing scene at the beginning the movie is great and the music that accompanies this scene almost promises that this film might be something good.
The shots of Sydney are nice and they even managed to fit something other then the Sydney harbour bridge in. ;)
The bad: No we really don't sound like that "mate". The accent was soooo overdone -especially at the beginning of the movie, that you could see the Australian audience cringing in the cinema. Shame it was an Australian actor trying to sound like a really overdone Aussie, but I guess that's what the producers thought overseas audiences expected us to sound like. The only redeeming part about this was the fact that the South African accent of another character was even worse.
Why did Tom hide out in an outback sheep station? I mean that would be hours of flight time in a helicopter to Sydney. There would have been heaps of better places to hang out that would have had rivers and trees and all that green stuff. Whoops. Remember the clichéd Australia! If you don't live in Sydney, you must live on a sheep station. There are going to be a lot of confused tourists during the Olympics, when they find out we talk different and most have never been to a sheep station!
Hey maybe I shouldn't criticise the clichéd stuff as most countries, other then America seem to cop this, but Tom Cruise knows much better. With an Australian wife he spends a lot of time out here and knows how crap this stuff all is. It would have been nice if he had been a bit more honest in how he showed Australians and Australia.
The action scenes were slow and few coming, so I was glad when we got to the chase scenes. First we had mostly older cars (Australian built Ford Falcons) blow up all over the place - even on wooden bridges, with no damage to the bridge of course and then, having gotten rid of them we had the bikes. The bikes went on and on and on, basically going on until the stunt riders had run out of ideas about what else they could do. The problem was that disbelief was an early victim of this scene, having spun out and crashed long before the bikes had done the same. Hey this is an action film and fiction, so I am happy to suspend belief, but this sort of stuff just kept on coming until you couldn't help but think 'enough!'
Maybe all of this could be forgiven if it had a good story. Well it seems some people found the first movie (which did have a plot) to hard to handle - sore heads from thinking and all that. So they dumbed this movie down and then did it again just to be sure. We have so little plot that it could be written on a napkin. Just to make sure we get it this time though, the main points are gone over at least a couple of times in the movie. A good thing perhaps for Australian audiences as early on we are still getting over the Aussie accent.
Anyway if you are guessing I didn't enjoy this film, you would be right. It's been getting fair to poor reviews in Australia and frankly it deserves them. A big disappointment for a John Woo directed film.
My advice is to wait until it's on cable.
Regards, Daniel