Mission: Impossible II

And here is where I gave up on the series. I liked the first one, it was 3 Days of the Condor with action, not as brilliant acting, not as talented a cast, but action packed fun. And then suddenly Tom has long hair and it's has no plot, there are a lot of pigeons all the time, the action looks corny and.... I checked out, I really did. Even the memory cards, they are spies that do action and they aren't using Compact Flash Cards? It made no sense, it was imagery over plot. It stank. But they made a lot more, and I might have watched the Ghost Recall or whatever it was called on, but don't really remember paying attention to it. This one took me out of the franchise.

This movie generally follows the formula of most spy and action movies, and certainly fits into the mission, impossible mold. I’m not much of a cinephile, and don’t normally notice a slight directorial selections, but the directing in this was terrible. Constant cut ways to waves or buildings or other things. This movie was not only anticlimactic with the final fight scene, which is poorly paste and poorly directed. Some of the set pieces were cool, but this went from being a spy type movie to more of an action movie and didn’t deliver on the promise. The first movie gave us. Probably the lowest in the mission impossible franchise.

"Ambrose" (Dougray Scott) is a disavowed IMF agent with a grudge. He is determined to procure and release a deadly hybrid "chimera" virus onto the streets of Sydney so he can push up the share price of the company that wins his auction to acquire it; and that can also manufacture the antidote "Bellerophon". It falls to "Ethan" (Tom Cruise) and his inventive gang of regulars to come up with a way to thwart this plot. To that end, he recruits the brassy thief "Nyah" (Thandiwe Newton) who gets to play a real love interest with "Ethan" whilst feigning one with "Ambrose" to get close to him and learn his plans. On the face of it, this is an ideal screenplay for this franchise, a sort of "James Bond" theme with plenty of location cinematography, action scenes and the odd gadget. Sadly, though, Scott is just not very menacing as the baddie and the story is really under-developed. The characters appear to be almost grinning their way through the unremarkable dialogue, and John Woo creates then recreates the action scenes as if it were just some sort of cartoon feature. The standard of the production is high, the staging of those action scenes is strong and well photographed, but the story just doesn't ever really get into gear and at over two hours, it's a pretty weak and insipid outing for just about everyone. Not a patch on the first film.