What should be impossible is making a movie this ridiculous.

Rating: 3/10 (3 July 2010)

"Just stay alive. I'm not going to lose you."
What was John Woo and Tom Cruise thinking? Or should I say, what were they smoking? How could they have not realized what a disaster they were involved in making? If I would have seen this at a theater, I don't know if I would have walked out after 15 minutes, or if I would have stayed just to see how much more absurd this thing could possibly get.
Mission Impossible 2 is nothing like the first movie or MI:3. For starters, those movies were actual good. The script for MI:2 was absolutely horrendous. We're expected to believe deep relationships exist between characters because they met, talked for all of 5 minutes, had a random car chase, and then immediately had sex. Some (most) of the dialogue was embarrassing to hear; I'm almost certain that it had to be just as embarrassing to say. Tom Cruise just grinned his way through the movie. Thandie Newton was completely wasted. The villain was too generic for me to even remember his name. The rest of the cast might as well not exist.
John Woo went waaay overboard with "stylistic" flourishes that are so ridiculous that they were genuinely funny. I mean, some of the stunts and action set-pieces are just surreal versions of what a 10 year-old boy thinks would be cool. Pointless slow motion. Doves. More pointless slow motion. More doves. And yet, somehow the movie was still boring. It shouldn't be possible for a movie with this many explosions and shoot-outs and absurd scenarios to be dull, but they somehow pulled it off. I guess that counts as an accomplishment. Congratulations?
Mission Impossible 2 was just dreadful. It's not stylish, it's a cheesy, over-the-top in all the wrong ways, string of ridiculous, artistically empty scenes. It could have been campy fun if it would have been presented in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but Woo was dead serious about all this nonsense. Even the IMF couldn't salvage an enjoyable experience out of this mess.