Appallingly bad trope-fest

Rating: 4/10 (28 August 2015)

This is one of the stupidest 'summer BlockBuster films' I've ever seen. Where something like Independence Day might be campy, overblown, and poorly written, at least someone bothered to write it.
Mission Impossible II never bothers to flesh out its characters or give them any personality, other than the film's 'Bond girl' whose eye- candy enough to keep the movie from being completely boring. For example, one of the main 'good guys' has an Australian accent. That's it. That's his whole character.
The main plot could have easily come from CSI: Miami. All the writing is just an excuse to show more and more stunts and a few lackluster explosions.
The acting is appalling. The writer has no idea how to write banter, and the acting coach doesn't know how to get people to say it. Even Anthony Hopkins seems to have forgotten how to say words in this movie, and its incredibly distracting. Hopkins in particular, actually, seems to be hamming his way through a local business commercial.
At one point it did have me, and I could excuse the Joel Schumacher style antics (I"m quite surprised he didn't direct MI:II). The female lead is convincing enough at first, and Ethan Hunt's method of recruiting her draws the viewer in. But then we go on to realise even she has no personality, just the old 'I'm a female thief' motif. This movie actually expects us to identify the characters with tropes and just let it go.
Where it really lost me was the ever increasingly outrageous fight scenes. At one point, the movie goes into literally a 26 minute chase scene followed by a 6 minute hand-to-hand combat scene. I'm guessing they had about 30 million dollars left in the budget and decided to spend it all on an extra 30+ minutes of stunt doubles flipping about and bikes doing wheelies. Serious, for that entire length of time there's 2 lines of dialogue between the ughs, bangs, and booms.
It keeps no consistency. One minute we're joking in the middle of a fight, the next Hunt is almost gruesomely decapitated by ...a rusty car bonnet... and the next the merciful good guys are laughing at a car full of enemies blown to pieces and sinking into the sea. MI:II is not trying to communicate anything in tone. That's mainly because many scenes are straight takes or homages to other movies and do not mold well with MI:II's campy blockbuster vibe.
On the upside, though, it has good cinematography when its not idiotically zooming in objects and faces, showing flashbacks of events that happened 5 minutes ago, and cutting away from action to save from paying for an actual effects/stunt department (instead of the film school students they seem to have hired to pump out this trite). Let's call this one an excuse to watch a 26 year old Thandie Newton make faces at the camera for 2 hours.