Ha ha and sportscars, it’s Burl here, reviewing
a John Woo picture I don’t think about very often! It’s called Mission Impossible 2, and, well, I’ll
say it up front: it’s not very good! Certainly I would say it’s the weakest of
this series of actionblasters!
But they’re not strictly actionblasters,
are they! No, these are spy pictures, and by design are meant to have as many
whispered conversations and meetings with the boss as they do car chases and
wild stunt-leaps! So John Woo, a director of uncommon technical skill, may not have
been the man to hire for this one, as his heart just doesn’t seem to be in
the non-action material! Maybe there was studio interference involved - ha ha, there usually seemed to be on Woo's American pictures!
Here we have that Tom “Edge of Tomorrow” Cruise again, not the clean cut teen agent he was
in Brian De Palma’s opening installment but now a longhair who likes free climbing
cliff faces! Ha ha, his employers - personified here by Anthony Hopkins for
some reason - send him a message by sunglasses and soon he’s on the case again,
chasing a rather generic bad guy, a rogue agent who will unleash a deadly viral
plague upon the world unless he is paid - now get this - £37 million! Ha ha,
calling Dr. Evil! I have a feeling the countries of the world would get
together to pay this strangely modest and specific sum rather than send out
their best agent on a risky, nay impossible,
mission!
But be that as it may, Ethan Hunt, mister
spy boy, is on the case! Not only must he face down the rogue agent, but his
lieutenant, who is depicted, if I read the performance right, as sporting a
powerful if resentment-frosted crush on his boss! That touch somehow seems
borrowed from the Hong Kong action movie casebook, though I can’t remember
where exactly I saw the dynamic before! Ha ha, maybe in Last Hurrah for Chivalry! Hunt must also sneak in somewhere to steal something, as he so often must, and he's also asked to dodge an awful lot of pigeons!
At any rate, the action scenes here,
replete with Woo-ian touches as they are, bat about .500 for me! The script, by
Robert Towne of all people (though based on a story written by others), salts
in a bit of Churchillian sexism for Hopkins to excrete for no particular reason
except maybe that Towne was arguing with his wife that week! There’s a sort of
deflated quality to the story, and meanwhile, like visits to the stations of
the cross, the narrative dutifully brings us at intervals to a point where
Cruise can ride a motorcycle through an explosion or something along that line!
It’s all decidedly ho-hum!
Things improved after this one, though not
mightily, with Mission Impossible III,
then hit a higher level of entertainment with the next three installments! The
fact is, except for some goofy transitions and all those birds, this picture is
pretty machine-tooled, and doesn’t have a tenth the appeal of something like Hard Boiled! I give Mission Impossible II one and a half flapping birds!
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