Mission: Impossible II

Brian De Palma’s inaugural transposition of the Mission:Impossible teleseries resulted in a commendable action film that combined a mind-bending plot with impressive action sequences.  M:I II reproduces the basic elements of that film but manages to loses one’s patience with a plot well-sundered from any credibility, excessive stuntwork and a failed attempt to sexy-up Tom Cruise.

Cruise is once again Ethan Hunt, a super-spy called-back from his holidays (which for Hunt means risking his life rock-climbing) in order to persuade a bootylicious jewel thief, Nyah Hall (Thandie Newton), to join him in a mission to retrieve a deadly virus from a rogue agent (Dougray Scott). Ving Rhames returns from the first film to be his I.T. wizard.

If De Palma’s taste for tales of urban violence and corruption endowed the previous film with an engagingly dark tone yet at the same time managed to have a sense of fun worthy of the original series, Hong Kong martial arts specialist John Woo is all about action and bar a joke about Cruise’s pearly grin, is largely humourless.

Thus, the film quickly flits around the globe from Sydney to Seville and has Hunt and Hall bumping metal in a car chase on a precipitous mountain road. Yes, it’s well staged but it also completely gratuitous. And that is pretty much the problem with the film – it’s all spectacle and when the spectacle is Tom Cruise displaying his martial arts chops that doesn’t amount too much, as Hunt escapes from one impossible situation only to encounter an either more impossible one. The final climactic confrontation is so ludicrous as to be an exhausting turn-off. That is, a bigger turn-off than the plodding script with its expository dialogue, cribbing from the earlier film (latex masks are over-used and the bravura break-in scene from that film is recycled here) and the incessant ogling of Ms. Newtown’s charms. Even Lalo Schiffrin’s classic theme music is tinkered around with, Hans Zimmer taking over from Danny Elfman in the first film

For local audiences there a lots of very well shot panoramas of Sydney Harbour and Richard Roxburgh plays a baddie with a dodgy South African accent and John Polson a goodie with a very Strine one but these are small compensations for such a considerably ill-judged affair.

 

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