Shaun de Waal
NOT QUITE THE THRILLER OFTHEWEEK
Tom Cruise has big plans for his Mission: Impossible franchise. The role of superspy Ethan Hunt offers him a well- paying action-movie base from which to venture in more challenging directions – Eyes Wide Shut, for instance, or his brilliant turn in Magnolia. Moreover, being co-producer as well as star, he can control what amounts to his very own series of James Bond thrillers. Expect to see him in Mission: Impossible VIII.
The basic template of Mission: Impossible II – or, to use its official cipher and save myself some typing time, M:i-2 – is indeed that of the Bond movie, the ones where the techno-hokum (what exactly is a “transponder”?) was starting to take over from any such measly consideration as a real plot. When a lissome lady thief he’s just rescued from a laughable near-death experience asks Cruise urgently, “Who are you?”, one fully expects him to reply, “The name is Hunt. Ethan Hunt.”
There are, though, significant differences between a Bond movie and M:i- 2. For one, Hunt shows more interest in the actual humanity of the women he beds. That’s good, because it allows some sexual jealousy to develop between Cruise-Hunt and the chief villain (Dougray Scott) over the matter of the aforementioned lissome lady thief (Thandie Newton). This also gives a good twist to the stand-off at the climax. Bond would have dispensed with her in a split second. Okay, maybe not, but only because he went to a good English school.
Another difference, of course, is that Cruise is not playing Bond. The character of Hunt, insofar as it is a character, is very much that of the sleek superspy, but Bond is defined by his English insouciance, and Cruise can’t do insouciant. He can do toothy grin (the villain has a witty line on that) and he can do urgent face- scrunching action, and, as Magnolia demonstrated, he can do loathsome – becoming, I thought, genuinely sexy for the first time – but sang-froid is beyond him.
M:i-2 is also more coherent than the last Bond movie, as well as being more coherent than the first Mission: Impossible. But then M:i-1 was directed by Brian de Palma, who brings his own special kind of incoherence to the movies he makes. John Woo is working from a script by Robert Towne of Chinatown fame, who also wrote some episodes of TV’s The Man from UNCLE (good experience for this gig), and as a mere action director he can’t be expected to befuddle us as completely as De Palma did the first time round.
What can be expected of Woo, though, is stunning action, and here, I’m afraid, he rather lets us down. M:i-2 is less exciting than Woo’s Broken Arrow or his Face/Off. In truth, I found swathes of it rather dull, though the action picks up toward the end, in a secret lab with more coloured lights than a funfair in full swing, and then in a reasonably good chase-cum-battle.
Yet even that, somehow, lacked (for me, at least, and I confess to being something less than an action devotee) the thrill quotient one might have expected of Woo. For one thing, it goes on for some time, and, for another, his slow/fast technique is feeling a bit over-used. Woo likes to shoot action kung-fu-style, with slow-motion segments juxtaposed with fast bits, which can have the effect of making physical combat seem more graceful and also, when it slams back into fast mode, more impactful. Here, though, it seems reduced in force. Cruise practically does cartwheels in mid-air in the course of executing a flying kick, and the shot takes so long that one wonders why his antagonist doesn’t simply step out of the way.
So, a mildly entertaining outing, then. No more. There are some laughs to be had, though, in the fact that one of the villains (Richard Roxburgh) is going as an Afrikaner, despite the very un-Afrikaans name Hugh Stamp. He does, at least, sport a preposterous parody of an Afrikaans accent, which is sure to raise chuckles in South African cinemas. M:i-2 doesn’t offer much else in the way of humour.