Mission: Impossible 2 Unleashes a Heavenly Host of Spin Kicks and Farts.
John Woo serves up an energy drink in movie form.
Hey everyone, it’s franchise time! The newest iteration of the neverending Mission: Impossible series is upon us, because it looks like someone forgot to get their ritual sacrifice right yet again this year. We’re going to keep getting these movies until the Elder Gods are appeased, it looks like, so we might as well have fun with ’em.
“The one with the Limp Bizkit song” applies perfectly to this movie, in every possible way the phrase might be interpreted.
This movie wants so bad to know if you remember the first one, but before you’ve even finished answering it’s like, “GOOD, BECAUSE FUCK THAT MOVIE,” and you’ve suddenly been overpowered by chugging guitar riffs and Tom Cruise’s hair, which received second billing in this film.
Welcome to Mission: Impossible 2.
Look, the first Mission: Impossible was, for the most part, an underhanded and heady espionage thriller, and everyone knows how fucking boring that shit is. Critically acclaimed? More like shittily framed, am I right? (Seriously, who even is Brian De Palma and why can’t he frame a shot right? Why aren’t there more birds? Why isn’t there more choppy, post-production slow motion?) Mission: Impossible 2 is the cure for the exercise in restraint and nuance that is predecessor didn’t even really bother being, undoing just about everything that made the first film in this franchise interesting by cranking it all way up to 15.
Almost literally every single thing about Mission: Impossible is amplified in John Woo’s bugfuck crazy 2000 sequel, and holy shit, what an egregious pile of hot garbage the result turns out to be. This movie’s plot makes even less sense than the first one, which was intentionally twisty and misleading (but still managed to be pretty coherent and relatively easy to put together, if you were paying attention). I wasn’t kidding when I said that literally everything about this movie got cranked up to full capacity. This happened whether it made sense to do so or not. Convoluted spy plot in the first film? Fuck you, straight-up incoherent corporate pharmaceutical intrigue in the second one. Thinly-sketched turncoat villain in the first film? Fuck you! A cartoonishly evil and sadistic bad guy in this one, who is literally still working for the good guys when he’s introduced at the start of the film, and whose motives for turning bad are very literally never mentioned, even in passing. A simpering, incapable sole female character who only exists to be batted around between the desires of two men in the first film? Yeah, fuck you, lots more of that shit in this one.
And so on and so forth. Mission: Impossible 2 finds Tom Cruise at the height of his hubris and power, seemingly intent on undoing every conscious decision that made the first movie special. THIS Ethan Hunt fucks, ladies and gentlemen. THIS Ethan Hunt knows fourteen different flying spin kicks and if he can find some more bad guys, he can’t wait to show you the rest of them. THIS Ethan Hunt shoots stuff, and you better believe your sweet ass he shoots stuff SO, so good. This Ethan Hunt mugs and smirks and spins and flips his way through the entire fucking film, to the point where another character even comments on how annoying it is (in what feels distinctly like an ad-lib, no less). Dougray Scott chews scenery like he’s convinced he’ll never work again, and even Thandie Newton is denied the chance to acquit herself nobly, at times framed such that her breasts are literally the only part of her body visible on screen (next to Tom Cruise’s face, of course).
Plagued by unintentional hilarity and constant overdirection, this movie is a fucking can of Surge in cinematic form, reeking of a clear reaction to all the nonsense that happened in the year or two before its release. Specifically The Matrix and GoldenEye, both of which are snaked time and time again by this weird hodgepodge of cultural reference points. Mission: Impossible 2 is clearly going for an “American James Bond” vibe, to the degree that the villain has his very own actual lair. Which is interesting, because as mentioned, the audience is explicitly informed that the bad guy was actually a good guy up until about 30 minutes before the start of the film.
This movie is just a rainforest of bad decisions: strange and lumbering performances hidden under a thick canopy of terrible choices and purely reactionary filmmaking that can’t help but reveal itself as such over and over again. In its own shambling way, it’s paradoxically more interesting than its predecessor, if only because each scene seems to offer up a new and even-more-baffling series of shitty calls. It’s unquestionably the one we’d all like to forget, but it’s exactly the things that give it this quality which also lend it its only redeeming aspect. This film is a time capsule of the highest order, each guitar chug a nail through the foot of whatever actual cultural relevance might have enabled it to move forward in time. Instead, Mission: Impossible 2 sits firmly stuck in the moment of its creation, a relic of the new millennium and all the dumb crap we thought was cool at the time. The only good news is that it’s as easy forget as the rest of that other crap was, too.
NB: This originally appeared at devisemag.com on July 23, 2018.
