2000 sequel
Rating: 10/20
Plot: Tom Cruise's character from the first Mission: Impossible movie runs off to Australia to fall in love and stop somebody from putting a dangerous biological weapon in the wrong hands.
The franchise shifts from Brian de Palma to John Woo and from Danny Elfman to Hans Zimmer, and neither change is a good one. I really kind of hated this movie, mostly because it doesn't even feel like a follow-up to the first movie in the franchise. It doesn't seem like Tom Cruise is even playing the same character, just another character that Tom Cruise could play adequately who is in a similar story. The romantic subplot does nothing but get in the way or make this feel like a James Bond clone. And with Woo bringing his hyper-stylized approach into the proceedings, this doesn't even feel like the same world.
The action scenes are ludicrous. No, you can't expect the good guys to ever get shot, but you can at least expect some close calls. There's never tension here because the bad guys are about the most inept collective that you'll find in a movie like this. The bad guys might as well not even have any weapons. The action sequences are filled with action movie cliches as well as what you have to call John Woo cliches. And yes, I'm talking about the doves. Fucking birds! There's so much slow motion in this movie that if you removed it all, the movie would be about an hour and fifteen minutes. Cars, during one of the most ludicrously pointless car chases you'll ever seen after Cruise meets Nyah, spin around in slow motion. Characters run in slow motion, punch in slow motion, dive in slow motion, get thrown twenty feet through the air in slow motion, eat peas in slow motion. Oh, and birds scatter in slow motion because of course they fucking do! What the hell is with the birds, Woo? You also get gunfight conversations, the kind of thing that really only Tarantino and maybe a few others can get away with. Tom Cruise, who spends the opening credits climbing a mountain for no reason at all, screams things like "I'm not going to lose you!" He does flips in midair before opening parachutes, probably because he was glancing at the storyboard and said, "Woo, this isn't how a Scientologist would do this. A Scientologist would totally do a flip right here."
See? Woo is just fucking with us!
The story for M:I2 (what the cool kids call it) isn't worth anybody's time. If it's not a story that's appeared in a movie before, I'd be surprised. But it's the little touches that make it completely idiotic, and this would probably have been as good as the first movie if it wasn't for the stupid masks in this. Things start with a Tom Cruise mask, and masks factor into things throughout this. It's just so stupid, the kind of thing that makes me mad just thinking about it. Much madder than I should be since I have no real attachment to this franchise. The story moves slowly, probably so that Woo can have enough space to show off how stylish he can be. At one point, Luther is working on a computer and Cruise says, "Isn't there any way we can speed this up?" Considering we had another slow motion scene juxtaposed with the boring computer work, I was actually asking the exact same question.
More annoying than the slow motion--the Zimmer score. There's all this terrible vocal music, but it's bad enough to compliment the slow motion sequences, I guess.
A question: Were the sunglasses in this an example of product placement? It seemed like they might have been, but I've never worn sunglasses and couldn't tell if it was a particular brand or not. I'm sunglasses illiterate.
Best scene in the movie, one that actually aroused me: a sequence where we see Chimera infecting the blood. That was hot. The rest of this movie was blandly stylistic.
It won't stop me from seeing the third installment though, but it's only because I want to see the new one where Tom Cruise hangs from an airplane.
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