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Tom Cruise joins forces with his ego to take on Mission: Impossible 2 |
Director: John Woo
Cast: Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Thandie Newton (Nyah
Nordoff-Hall), Ving Rhames (Luther Stickell), Dougray Scott (Sean Ambrose),
Brendan Gleeson (John C McCloy), Anthony Hopkins (Mission Commander Swanbeck),
Richard Roxburgh (Hugh Stamp), John Polson (Billy Baird), Radé Sherbedgia (Dr
Nekhorvich), William Mapother (Wallis), Dominic Purcell (Ulrich)
Okay. I love this franchise. Always have. But every
franchise has its misfire right? Its Phantom
Menace? Ladies and gentlemen: welcome to this total turkey. Can you believe
this was the biggest box office hit of 2000? Has anyone watched it since then?
Did anyone like it even then?
Anyway, the plot for what it’s worth, plays like Hitchcock’s
Notorious if it had been roughly
humped after a drunken dinner by The Fast
and the Furious. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has to recruit the bizarrely named
Nyah Nordeff-Hall (Thandie Newton), a society catburgler and sort of hot
Raffles. Why? Well of course her ex-boyfriend and rogue MIF agent Sean Ambrose
(Dougray Scott) has pinched a deadly virus and we need her to get back into his
bed and trust to find out more so MIF can pinch it back before it hits the
market. She’ll be ready to deceive a man though because “she’s a woman, she has
all the training she needs” – or so says Anthony Hopkins’ half-asleep Mission
Commander.
Mission: Impossible 2
barely has a plot though. Rarely has a film looked more like a story loosely
written around some pre-determined action set-pieces. Much as I like Tom
Cruise, no film looks more like a cocky vanity project than this one. The
camera lingers on Cruise’s chiselled torso and general macho physicality like a
lovestruck teenager. Remember when the MIF was a team organisation? Not anymore.
Cruise is now a one man army, who barely needs the help of his two sidekicks
(the job of one is to press keys on a computer, the other flies a helicopter.
That’s it).
So the whole film is about making Cruise look good. From
punching, to climbing freestyle up a cliff, to flashing the famous grin, to
driving cars and bikes really fast,
the whole film is blinded by his smile. Poor Thandie Newton and Dougray Scott
can only watch as the Cruiser bestrides the film like a colossus, creeping
about to find themselves dishonourable graves. Both performers are crushed by
the weight of Cruise’s ego and the film’s front-and-centering of it. Newton can
barely raise her performance above balsawood. Poor Dougray Scott not only gives
an utterly bland performance, but was stuck on the set for so long by
production delays he had to pull out of the first X-Men film, giving his role of Wolverine to an unknown West End
actor by the name of Hugh Jackman. Ouch.
Perhaps as a reaction to the first film being seen as too confusing
(it really isn’t…) the plot is almost laughably simple, verging on pointless.
The film homages (rips off) other, way, way better films everywhere you look.
So we get flirting-through-racing-fast-cars from GoldenEye. We get the almost the whole plot of Notorious with the woman sent to spy on her former lover by a
handler who is now in love with her (the film even has an extended racecourse
sequence). “I will find you” Cruise bellows at Nyah at one point like a low
rent Last of the Mohicans. It doesn’t
help that the film sounds like the writers spent about five minutes on the
dialogue: “Damn you’re beautiful” Cruise tells Nyah. Well, be still my beating
heart. This shit was penned by the writer of Chinatown for fuck’s sake.
The slight plot could probably be comfortably wrapped up in
about an hour, if it wasn’t for the film’s constant (embarrassing) use of slow
motion at every conceivable opportunity. I guess it’s meant to add style and
depth, but it’s actually crushingly annoying and often gives us laughable
moments (none more so than Cruise walking past a flaming doorway in slow motion
for no reason). You just want to tell the film to get a bloody move on.
But then that is part of the John Woo style. Hard to believe
this style of shooting an action film was once considered cool beyond belief.
It looks so pretentiously, artily, self-importantly, thuddingly dull now. There
are a huge number of action scenes here but none of them are particularly
exciting, and none of them hugely memorable. There is a bit with a bike, a bit
with cars, a shoot-out in a base, an infiltration of a big building. Yawn.
Perhaps because Ethan Hunt feels less like a human, more like an empathy-free, ego-mad
super soldier, it’s hard to care. In every other film, time is invested to make
him appear human – here he’s an asshole who forces a woman to give her body for
secrets, grins like a lunatic and slaughters people left, right and centre.
It’s like he’s been given an arsehole upgrade from the first film (the third
film would correct all this).
The film has no humour whatsoever. It’s po-faced and serious
and desperately in love with itself. I keep banging on Cruise, but I think I do
blame him. Other than Hopkins, no one in the film can compete with his charisma
which feels like a deliberate choice. Every single memorable thing in the film
is done by him. No other character is allowed to contribute anything to the
resolution of the problem. On top of that every character seems to have a Tom
Cruise mask – meaning Tom also gets to play at least three other characters as
well.
John Woo shoots all this with a tedious flashiness that is
completely empty. Logic is left lying battered and bruised on the sidewalk. By
the time we get to the final resolution, we are desperate for Nyah (who has
been used for sex, humiliated and infected with a deadly virus) to tell Cruise
to get stuffed. Instead (after watching him gun down a pliant Sean Ambrose, who
is never allowed to appear as a worthy adversary) they go on a sun dappled date
in Sydney, with Cruise all but turning to the camera to wink. “Don’t you wish
you were me?” he seems to be saying. Christ I really don’t.
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