Mission: Impossible 2 2000
I am trying to work my way through the Mission: Impossible series having started at 6 before going back to 4 which was the first of the good ones, thinking I would skip the first three altogether and then watch 5, which I still haven't seen. Instead 7a came out, but a friend said I needed to watch 1 to get some important background. Ugh. So after all of that and getting the first six in 4k digital, I decided to watch 2. The movie starts out fine, with some normal Mission: Impossible stuff. A rogue IMF agent (so many of these! Do they do background checks?) steals a deadly virus that is incredibly contagious and kills its victims in 20 hours. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise recruits the beautiful Thandie Newton and falls in love. I didn't know she was that pretty honestly, but she has a great look and they always have wind blowing through her hair, eventually losing all of her character and just becoming a look with billowing hair. John Woo directed this movie, and while he came to the United States with a great reputation in Hong Kong cinema, I thought his movie Face/Off was terrible: just tons of stylized, unrealistic violence. That trademark doesn't show up much until the last 50 minutes or so of this movie and then suddenly it is like we are in a music video with some of the absolutely silliest fight moves (Cruise repeatedly does some kind of flip upside-down before he kicks people in the head), car chases, and shootouts, and it just goes completely off the rails. They repeatedly use the entirely unrealistic idea of being able to quickly generate a perfect mask of someone that they then peel off, even when it makes almost no sense. Really none of it makes that much sense. There is only one copy of the virus, but is that ever the way it works? If they could make it once, couldn't they make it again? After this movie, with many today saying it is the worst of the entire series, Woo quickly lost favor in Hollywood. In fact, most of this cast was never seen again.
I got a 4k digital copy of this movie and watched it on Vudu. I am pretty sure it was playing properly, but it looked incredibly soft and grainy and the colors were off, with Cruise's skin often having a reddish or purple tint. So even that was a disappointment. About all the movie has going for it is that it is part of a massive franchise and there are some impressive action scenes even if they often look fake or don't make any sense.
Written: 23 Apr 2024
Owned on: Digital