Mission: Impossible II

UK Release Date. 7 July 2000
Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 3 mins
Director. John Woo
Cast. Tom Cruise, Brendan Gleeson, Thandie Newton, John Polson, Ving Rhames, Richard Roxburgh, Dougray Scott.
Rating. 54%

Review.

"This isn't Mission: Difficult, Mr Hunt. It's Mission: Impossible. Mission: Difficult ought to be a walk in the park for you."

Mission Commander Swanbeck's (Anthony Hopkins) quip is by far and away the highlight of Mission: Impossible II. 

Four years after the release of Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible II arrived. But Mission: Impossible II was a film that seemed badly out of step with its 1996 counterpart. The two films feel very different. Perhaps because Paramount Studios wanted to produce a film that focused more on action, rather than the international espionage that bogged down Mission: Impossible. The sequel certainly took care of that, focusing solely instead on the stylised action set pieces its director John Woo was known for. In doing so, it robbed Mission: Impossible II of its heart. 

Mission: Impossible II exudes over-confidence and smugness, traits that are misplaced amidst the lacklustre plot and vacuous cheesy clichés. In particular, the arrogance of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) latently evident in Mission: Impossible has come to the fore in Mission: Impossible II. From the opening credits, where Tom Cruise performs an impressive, but ultimately pointless, rock climbing routine, Ethan Hunt is apparently ready to face the world alone.

More controversially, from a moral standpoint is the misogynistic undertone of Mission: Impossible II. Some may argue that the plot is not dissimilar to Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, in that an incredibly attractive civilian (Ingrid Bergman) is used by a government agent (Cary Grant) to seduce a former lover, a suspected criminal (Claude Rains). Whilst Mission: Impossible II has borrowed the outline of events from Notorious, the film does not have the fortitude to generate any degree of moral conflict from this deplorable act. Hitchcock's Notorious is one of the best film noirs of all time, and the heat generated by Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant is off the scale. The same cannot be said for Ethan Hunt and Nyah Hall (Thandie Newton). They simply don't have the right amount of chemistry to sell the presumably intense attraction they feel for each other and no amount of trademark slow-motion exchanges will convince me otherwise.

But Mission: Impossible II is not without its charms. Alongside Sir Anthony Hopkins' rebuke, Hans Zimmer gives Lalo Schrifin's iconic theme a metal mix. And it works.

In addition, John Woo's strength in staging edge-of-your-seat action sequences was unparalleled at that time. His distinctive cinematography is unlike any of his contemporaries and the final confrontation is where the director is in his element. To the point where Woo replicates the exalted motorcycle duel from one of his earlier films, Hard Target.

Ultimately though, Mission: Impossible II falls flat, time and time again and is easily the weakest film in the franchise.