Okay, Yeah, “M:I-2” Is Actually A Masterpiece
I’m persuaded. This meme is correct.
Confession: I grew up on M:I-2. It was the new Mission: Impossible when I was getting into movies.
This movie has a few weird connections for me. I love that it takes place almost entirely in Sydney. I lived there for a month in college, and I actually saw John Woo’s RED CLIFF — in its original, two-part, four-hour form—at a movie festival. He did a Q&A. Big Woo fan.
Anyway, if you think of M:I-2 as a Woo movie in a Mission: Impossible skin, with Tom Cruise playing a bad boy and for once kind of pulling it off, this film really works. He gets to be Woo’s American Chow Yun Fat.
The Woo-isms are everywhere. Doves. Doubles. Good and Evil. Tom Cruise’s sunglasses explode into the credits, as that Limp Bizikit song kicks in. It knows what it wants to be.
Dougray Scott is one thing that doesn’t really work for me, though his Sean Ambrose is at least written as smart and cunning. It’s a boost for the movie that Cruise is given several chances to play Ambrose, thanks to the trademark masks.
Thandie Newton is so good, even she can create a sexual spark with an Ethan Hunt character that might otherwise work better more asexual. Her thief’s meet-cute/recruitment with Hunt is hot as hell.
And Anthony Hopkins is less present than Jon Voight or his successor characters, but he’s always a welcome face.
The stunts aren’t on the level of the later films, but the rock climbing opener is an evocative visual that serves as a thematic reciprocal to the plane heist that actually begins the movie. M:I-2 is also the one that first gave us the Mission: Impossible motorcycle chase. Except here, it’s a ballet.
Long-Haired Ethan shows up and we get the beginning of the series’s obsession with biologic threats.
The Aussie sidekick didn’t stick and that’s fine. But Ving Rhames is back and great.
Listen, I’m not saying it’s high art necessarily. But this movie kind of rules.
