There are three reasons I should never have watched M:I 2. The first is that I make a point of avoiding Tom Cruise movies. The second is that I make a point of avoiding sequels (particularly when I'm bored by the first film in a series). And the third--and most important--reason that I should never have watched M:I 2 is that Mrs. Sloucho knew I would hate it. After she went to see it in the theater with friends, she came home to say that she was very glad she had not taken me to watch it, as it features all of the pompous pyrotechnics of the inflated '80s adventure flicks that I despise even more than Cruise himself.

But when we acquired a new DVD player and surround sound system, Mrs. Sloucho insisted on renting M:I 2 because she knew that it would show off all the bells and whistles of our latest technological acquisition. She was right about that. She also knew that she would have to get me into the right frame of mind to watch the film. On that count she was wrong. I have never in my life been in a good enough mood to enjoy a bloated action epic such as M:I 2, no matter what kind of credibility the director has with the cinema geeks whose approval I seek [1].

Before starting the film, Mrs. Sloucho and I treated ourselves to a nifty little feature on the DVD called Mission Improbable. It's a genuinely hilarious sketch in which Ben Stiller portrays a character named Tom Crooze, the stunt double that Tom Cruise doesn't need. The fact that John Woo himself was somehow wrangled into contributing to this piece (which plays like an inspired Saturday Night Live sketch) is perhaps its funniest moment. But Cruise's participation--particularly his laughter at the end--is genuinely entertaining.

I choked down rather a lot of tequila while watching Stiller's antics, but Mrs. Sloucho and I knew that it still wasn't enough tequila. So we watched the DVD extra that explains how the stunts were handled. Though not as entertaining as the comedy sketch, it was interesting enough and provided me with time to get a few more shots of tequila into my system.

But I still wasn't drunk enough to face an action-adventure epic starring Tom Cruise, so we started to watch the story behind the production of the film. That is where the trouble began. Cruise's co-producer very mechanically explains how one goes about making a movie that will attract as many stupid people as possible to the box office. She talks about irony as if it's just another ingredient in a film--something that one doesn't want to overdo. And then we get the interview with consummate hack Robert Towne, who never quite manages to wipe the shit-eating grin off his face as he explains that his job was to come up with a story that would serve as a skeleton that could be fleshed out by action sequences whose storyboards had already been finished.

You should really stop reading this review right now just as I should have stopped watching the DVD right then. I suspected I would hate M:I 2 because of the things Towne said and the way he said them. And that's not fair. Films amount to more than their stories, more than their dialogue, more than their characters. There's a visual element in film that is ultimately the responsibility of the director, not the writer. And given John Woo's universally acknowledged greatness, I knew that the important thing to do was to watch the film while ignoring the characters and the story.

But I couldn't. I'm just fundamentally more interested in the things people say and the ways in which they interact than I am in car chases and exploding motorcycles. M:I 2 is not only not about characters and their stories; it is genuinely about the fact that it is not about characters and their stories. It may be two hours of extraordinary eye candy as purveyed by the gifted John Woo, but it is also two hours of being mocked by Robert Towne for what he presents as our unforgivable flaw of being interested in characters and their stories.

How do we know that Towne is mocking us and not simply churning out another piece of dreck?

The dialogue in M:I 2 is rather obviously a running commentary on the composition of the screenplay. We begin with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) receiving his assignment in a predictably outrageous fashion. In order to learn what he is to do, he has to don the bad boy sunglasses that screech 'attitude' (just as they did for Poochie on The Simpsons). He then has to recruit a sexy partner in crime, an accomplished thief named Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton). The recruitment leads to a car chase which leads, naturally, to a romantic involvement. We've established the love interest and the existence of an assignment, just as things usually develop in a James Bond film. After this completely by-the-numbers introductory sequence, Ethan looks at Nyah in complete silence before announcing, "This wasn't completely by the book."

That's just the kind of irony that Hollywood producers love. They think it's cute when you do things by the book and then assure the audience that you didn't. But Towne doesn't let up.

When Ethan announces to his colleagues that they are in search of a virus (Chimera) and its anti-virus (Bellerophon), one of them poses a question that comes out of nowhere: "That simple, huh?"

Ethan's response: "Why not?"

One has no choice but to imagine Towne rejecting one maguffin after another for the film and then stumbling upon the idea of a virus and its anti-virus and calling his agent to explain his idea. The agent says, "That simple, huh?" Towne says, "Why not?" And then he can't resist the urge to include that exchange in the actual script.

But isn't it all right for a writer--even a hack like Towne--to have fun in this way? Isn't it good that he mocks his script? I don't object to the ways in which Towne mocks his own screenplay. I think it's funny when the evil Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) deconstructs Hunt's Biocyte break-in before the fact: "He'll undoubtedly engage in some acrobatic insanity before he'll risk harming a hair on a security guard's head."

The problem, however, is that Towne is not content to mock his script. He mocks his viewers as well. After everything has been worked out at the end of the film, Hunt's boss Commander Swanbeck (played for absolutely no reason by Anthony Hopkins) explains that Nyah's criminal record will be 'expunged.' He pauses briefly before telling Ethan that expunged means 'wiped out.' Now if he didn't think that Hunt knew the term 'expunged,' why did he use it? And since Hunt certainly knows the word, why does Swanbeck define it? It isn't for Hunt, but for us, the people stupid enough to have shelled out our hard-earned cash for dreck like this [2].

Although Towne says in the interview that his objective was to write a film for stupid people, that fact is made abundantly clear by the film's decison to give us three different expositions of the plot [3]. Such painful moments are extremely difficult to stomach, no matter the beauty of the film in which they appear.

Setting aside the script

Despite its offensive and rather high-handed script, M:I 2 is extremely interesting from a visual perspective. Woo succeeds brilliantly in giving us a film that looks like a video game. The fighting sequences are right out of Mortal Combat; the sets all look as if they belong in rpg/adventure games such as Myst. And when Woo's signature pigeon flies through a flaming doorway, we feel as if the next image we will see will feature the 'load game' and 'new game' options. Woo has an eye not only for explosions and kicks to the head, but for fabric rustling in the wind and the tension of stillness in the human body.

The DVD plays to the video game-ish quality of the film by featuring a series of menus that could easily have been designed by Squaresoft. It also features a directorial commentary in which Woo talks about the film as the film plays. Woo is an interesting guy to listen to, but I fear he is not interesting enough for me to subject myself to Towne's offensive storyline once again. There you have it: I'm more interested in writing than in being a cineaste.



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[1] I considered entitling this review "An Open Letter to Mangiotto" in imitation of a clever review addressed to Mike_Bracken by ZentropaJK. Mangiotto's excellent "Wooisms: A Primer" is a must read for those seeking to understand why all of the criticisms that I will make in the course of my review are not nearly as debilitating as I imagine them to be. The review, which can be found here:
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-747E-1242CF07-3941F36D-prod1/tk_~CB008.1.5
articulates quite charmingly both who I will alienate with this essay and why I should know better. As Walter says, "In a very short period of time, Woo has become the most imitated director in the world. Films as varied in quality from the Matrix to Killing Zoe employ scenes, characters, and stunts that have long been a staple of the growing Woo archetype. Those in 'the know' - that legion of geeky, parents' basement-dwelling, Dungeons & Dragons-playing, philospher-kings that own bootleg copies of The Killer in Cantonese - know that when some cracker hack with a steady cam makes an action film in the United States, it will inevitably contain a scene that they aped from a Woo classic."

[2] Walter, this is the part that is most like an open letter to you. You'll note that the argument I've made here mirrors my own argument concerning Charlie's Angels and draws particularly on an instance that is reminiscent of your brilliant point concerning the use to which the Scrabble game was put in that film. So if I liked Charlie's Angels, why don't I also like M:I 2? Can't I just say that Towne is punishing us for being idiots and call it a good thing and give a hearty thumbs up to Woo's direction? The difference, as I see it, is in terms of the appropriateness of the punishment. We need to be punished by films like Charlie's Angels until we stop paying for Hollywood's forays into television shows. But we already stopped paying for bloated Schwarzeneggerish action epics. To be sure, we've moved on to other, equally objectionable, pabulum. But what's the point in punishing us for watching a film such as M:I 2 if M:I 2 is the only such film being made these days? Punish us for the extra-terrestrial epic (e.g. Independence Day) or the romance/disaster epic (e.g. Titanic or Pearl Harbor, though that recovered genre was obviously not established when M:I 2 was being made). But don't punish us with a Van Damme plotline and Seagall characters now that we're all sick of Van Damme and Seagall.

[3] I'm too much of a fan of good dialogue to be interested in the bad kind, no matter how interestingly bad it is. Mangiotto, however, makes an interesting case for an alternate perspective: "the bizarre and stilted dialogue - When a Western director films bizarre and stilted dialogue, they have made the terrible and lamentable error of hiring Joe Ezstherhaus - when Woo films bizarre and stilted dialogue he is saying "I am filming Opera. Spoken Opera sounds odd, does it not?"



Recommended: No