"
well this is not mission : difficult , mr .
hunt , it 's mission : impossible .
difficult should be a walk in the park for you .
"
---agent swanbeck ( sir anthony hopkins ) , the series ' new agent phelps , takes ethan hunt ( tom cruise ) down a notch .
a russian scientist ( rade serbedzija ) has created a new virus ( and its antidote ) called chimera that destroys its host within twenty hours of injection .
a rogue imf agent , sean ambrose ( dougray scott ) , wants to use the disease and cure to blackmail a pharmaceutical company into selling him enough stock to make him owner of the company ( he knows it will soon be worth its weight in gold thanks to the outbreak of the virus he is going to cause ) .
posing as ethan hunt , ambrose gains the confidence of the scientist long enough to get only the cure , not realizing that the scientist had injected himself with the virus to prevent exactly what ambrose was trying to do .
the real ethan hunt is called in from his vacation to persuade beautiful thief nyah nordoff - hall ( thandie newton ) to assist the imf team in retrieving the stolen goods .
ethan and nyah fall quickly in love , but ethan soon finds himself in a real dilemma when he learns that his new love has only been hired because she was a former lover of ambrose 's .
reluctantly , he sets up nyah to be rescued from prison by ambrose so she can infiltrate his compound and send back intelligence to the team .
ethan must race against time to keep ambrose from obtaining and spreading the virus and prevent any harm from coming to nyah .
although the first mission : impossible film was a moderate box office success , audiences panned it because they felt the plot was too confusing and there was n't much action ( although being a fan of the series both old and new , i thought the movie was pretty decent and especially gutsy to make phelps a bad guy ) .
that problem has been rectified in the sequel by making the plot more accessible ( courtesy of one of the writers of the previous entry , robert towne ) and by turning the film into one gigantic action set piece under the steady hand of action film guru john woo .
the end result is one of the most entertaining ( yet simple ) action films made in a long while .
unfortunately , the first forty minutes or so are relatively slow , dwelling mainly on ethan and nyah 's quickly blossoming romance and seeming more in place in a james bond film than with the less glamorous mission : impossible tv series .
ethan 's conflict is a compelling one , but it seems very rushed ( and comes about because of a near fatal car wreck that ethan himself causes ! ) .
john woo handles all of this with an artistic flair that seems out of place , featuring a great deal of slow fades and dramatically framed close - ups .
the surreal nature of these sequences are distracting and ultimately a detriment to the film .
thankfully though , at the point ambrose discovers nyah 's deception , mission : impossible ii becomes
very entertaining and action - packed
.
robert towne 's screenplay takes some of the conventions set up in the first film and parodies them during a sequence where ethan must break into a high - rise building and retrieve the remaining specimens of the virus .
after that , the action scenes just begin to build in intensity , as is the case with many of woo 's previous high - octane films .
the final half hour is an all out assault of action ( a good deal of which is ruined by the trailer , unfortunately ) . as far as summer entertainment goes , mission : impossible ii is serviceable fare .
anyone looking for hardcore action wo n't be disappointed ( except for during the first half of the film , perhaps ) .
even if you were n't a fan of the first film , this entry deserves some checking out .
[ pg-13 ]
Output: P