The First Best Entry in the "Mission Impossible" Franchise

Rating: 9/10 (6 May 2019)

After the hideous debacle of director Brian De Palma's "Mission Impossible" movie, Tom Cruise redeemed himself with this exciting, entertaining, and thoroughly exhilarating sequel. If you grew up watching the venerable CBS-TV series that toplined Peter Graves as the head honcho Mr. Phelps, the first movie left a rotten taste in your mouth because Mr. Phelps (the incomparable Jon Voight) treacherously betrayed Ethan Hunt and the rest of the team. The true star of "MI 2" wasn't the dynamic Cruise. Instead, famous Hong Kong action movie maestro John Woo took the franchise to heights heretofore never scaled with his stylishly orchestrated action sequences and his flying doves. At that time, Woo was known primarily for his foreign actioneers "The Killer" (1989) and "Hard-Boiled" (1992), but he had recently come to America and made a name for himself the unforgettable Jean-Claude Van Dame thriller "Hard Target" (1993) and then surpassed himself with the John Travolta & Christian Slater saga "Broken Arrow") after which Travolta and Nic Cage teamed up for his splendid law & order yarn "Face/Off" (1997). Dougray Scott digs his heels in hard as our hero's chief adversary and their showdown on motorcycles is spine-tingling stuff. Thandie Newton plays Cruise's leading lady. "Chinatown" scenarist Robert Towne, working from a story by future "Battlestar Galactica" producer Ronald D. Moore and "Star Trek: First Contact" scribe Brannon Braga, didn't make the same mistake as the origins film.