Mission: Impossible 2

"Mission: Impossible" was one of the most overrated action films of all time. It's not often that a movie whose climactic scene features a helicopter in a train tunnel manages to suck, but "Mission: Impossible" did. Brian DePalma, in retrospect, was sliding precipitously into the pit of cinematic awfulness whose bottom he reached in "Mission to Mars"; the action direction was workmanlike at best, the effects were pretty good but nothing movie-carrying, and he did absolutely nothing to help the audience sort out the mind-numblingly complex and fairly useless plot. The other problem was Tom Cruise, who is not a man, as he showed when he uttered the phrase "You...complete me" without irony to Renee Zellweger in "Jerry Maguire." Manhood is essential for a male action film star, and Cruise never proved he wasn't a smirking prettyboy.

So the hopes of action filmgoers everywhere simultaneously soared and plummeted when it was announced that John Woo would be directing the uselessly abbreviated "M:I 2" (not the film, the title). Would Woo, director of such classics of manly cinema as "Hard Boiled," "A Better Tomorrow" and "Face/Off," bring out the inner man in Cruise? (For an inner man exists in all of us males, even Richard Simmons and Nathan Lane.) Or would Cruise's inner man continue to be covered by his prettyboy smirking and pectoral showing-off?

The answer is: Cruise is now a man, thanks to a baptism at the hands of John Woo. Woo is simply the finest action director now working; even his less-than-stellar efforts, like "Broken Arrow," elicit more adrenaline than most action directors will ever produce. He fires on all cylinders in this film. The characteristics of the Woo style are well-established, both in terms of specific directorial tics like his love of birds with their wings dramatically flapping and more general stylistic points like his extravagant, waste-of-valuable-lead-reserves gunfights. But what Woo is really about is a love of movement, all movement; he proves this in this film by bringing out both the beauty and portentious dread in a dance performance as Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton size each other up at a party.

Of course, it's all the better if the movement involves killing people, and action lovers will feast on the spread Woo offers for their delectation in "M:I 2." You got your intimidating dialogue complete with digit-menacing and ominous foot-pounding; you got your amazing mid-movie gunfight in a research lab, wherein Tom Cruise goes (there's no other way to say it) Chow Yun-fat on the asses of many, many bad guys, featuring yet another Woo signature, the swooping music over the soundless gunfight; you got Cruise acting like a character from Virtua Fighter 2 with his martial arts moves, which entertain in exact proportion to their complete preposterousness; and you have an absurdly overextended hand-to-hand combat sequence at the very end wherein Cruise must overcome his inexplicable antipathy towards brutally killing his own enemies, even when said enemies are plotting to infect everyone with a deadly virus. And thankfully, Woo also keep the "plot" admirably lucid. (This, by the way, has to be the first time in action film history in which the villains demand stock options in return for not killing people.)

Woo handles the other elements of the plot well, too. The other reason action filmgoers' hopes sank when this film was announced was because it is partially a love story, and not between a man and his gun, either; Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton are supposed to carry on a real romance in between each of them getting beat up or beating people up. This works surprisingly well. Cruise's "You...complete me" side serves him well here; after all, his ability to act in romantic movies was never much in doubt.

As for Thandie Newton, no praise your reviewer could heap upon her would be too lavish. Her brown eyes are so deep and rich that a man could concievably take it into his head to dive in and swim around a bit. Her smile is luminous, her skin is flawless, her accent is rich and invigorating, and to paraphrase modern romantic balladeer Sisqo, she's got "dumps like a truck." She's onscreen an insane amount of time in this film, and it's never enough.

Like many John Woo films, "M:I 2" stretches gracefully over its two-and-a-half hours, never losing the viewer's interest. In other hands, this length would be excessive, but action filmgoers will wish this never ended.

In short, this is another masterwork from the leader of the action pack. After all, who else but John Woo could make Tom Cruise almost as manly as Chow Yun-fat?

Case closed.

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