Tom Cruise: International Man Of Mystery

Rating: 2/10 (8 June 2000)

"Mission: Impossible 2" is pretty much a hodge-podge of favorites from the action/adventure genre: A car chase down a winding, cliffside road; a surveillance scene at a race track; the action-hero-sent-to-recruit-beautiful-jewel-thief-but-falls-in-love-with-her -instead plotline; a plane crashing into a mountain; the manly action hero dangling from a cliff--for leisure. This film is like an 'action movie valu-pack.' All the ingredients of your favorite action movie flavors all in one movie! For one low price!
Wouldn't it be nice if someone created a completely original character, rather than simply ripping off James Bond all the time? Bond was a great idea forty years ago, when it was new. Example: Indiana Jones, an archaeologist searching for lost artifacts--one of the best movie characters anyone ever thought up. What we're basically offered here, though, is another spy movie about--and I still can't believe the blatant unoriginality--a madman who wants to unleash a killer virus. Tom Cruise's character, Ethan Hunt (a name almost as cool as 'Tom Cruise'), would like to stop him. Might as well call it "Austin Powers 3." After watching this dreck, I kind of missed the twisty, incomprehensible plot of 1997's "Mission: Impossible." Even if you couldn't understand what was going on half the time, at least it was interesting. At least the story held true to the spirit of the "Mission: Impossible" TV series and opened with a team mission. The excuse for Cruise being a loner for the rest of the movie is that most of his team members are killed in that opening sequence (sorry for the spoiler). In the sequel, Robert Towne and John Woo have no such excuse. They never even attempt to introduce a team concept.
Instead, we're given Tom Cruise. With long hair. Riding a motorcycle. Through fire. In slow motion. The film's creators go to great lengths to insure their star looks as cool as possible. I can't understand why Cruise wants to be Jean-Claude Van Damme all of a sudden. He doesn't even know martial arts, and yet here he is, jumping around, kicking people in the face. Who decided, I wonder, that two guys who can't fight beating the crap out of each other was fun to watch?
John Woo's goal, to break his own record for slow motion shots in a film, is achieved here (when a dove flies across the frame in slow motion as a stony-eyed Cruise walks toward us, I swear I wished it would crap on him). Had all of M:I 2's slow motion shots been done at normal speed, the film would've been a half hour long. Woo invented what is now being dubbed "beautiful violence," a filming style now in use by every action director on earth. With his latest, Woo seems determined to drive his own invention into the ground.
Grade: D