1) PROPOSITION: Brain De Palma makes bad films more often than he makes good films.
2) PROPOSITION: Mission Impossible was a Brian De Palma film.
3) THUS: Mission Impossible was more likely than not to be a pretty bad film.
B) ON JOHN WOO:
1) PROPOSITION: John Woo makes good action films.
2) PROPOSITION: Mission Impossible 2 is an action film.
3) THUS: Mission Impossible 2 was more likely than not to be a pretty good film.
C) ON MISSION IMPOSSIBLE AS A FRANCHISE:
1) PROPOSITION: A3 was proven not to be correct - Mission Impossible was a perfectly reasonable movie (not great but reasonable).
2) PROPOSITION: B3 was proven not to be correct - Mission Impossible 2 was an imperfectly awful movie (not Barb Wire, but pretty bad).
3) THUS: With Mission Impossible movies, all rational thought goes right out of the window.
PLOT ANALYSIS:
There's this virus. It kills people. Bad guys have a cure for the virus, but they don't yet have the virus. If they get the virus they can hold the whole world to ransom with the cure. Ethan Hunt (rhyming slang/Tom Cruise) has to assemble a team comprising Thandie Newton (dripping, charisma free uber-pain in the butt), some Australian bloke (apparently a trained IMF agent, even though all he can do that I couldn't is fly a helicopter, and you can have lessons for that kind of stuff) and Ving Rhames, who is a god, a worshipful god, a deity and master of the universe, and is given absolutely NOTHING to do except jump out of a van, and be a computer geek (thus freeing Cruise from the stigma of actual intelligence). Bad guys include a distinguished Australian stage actor playing a South African (hmmm) who has his finger chopped off and isn't really very scary, Doug Ray Scott who does good eyebrow work and mumbles his way through ridiculous dialogue (and isn't scary in the slightest), oh and some other people who you really won't care about much.
SEQUEL STATUS:
Second films generally up the ante a bit. The point of the first film is made more obvious and played up. First film had an epic, intelligent break-in to the Pentagon, the heart of American security. Second film has a guy on a rope in the center of a drug company building. I mean - it's not exactly the destruction of the death-star is it?
And while we're at it, the first film was full of stunts, but it was the INTRIGUE that was in the centre. I mean - everyone knows that the first film played that card a little too hard, fast and often, but there is no intrigue AT ALL in MI2. Not even a little bit. It's explosions, car chases, gadgets and sex. It's a Bond film without the style and with more testosterone. Which wasn't the point at all...
CONCLUSION:
Normally when I write something for Epinions, I try to think about what the film is attempting to accomplish and on what levels it is working that aren't necessarily immediately obvious. MI2 isn't doing anything new, it isn't playing to any part of the psyche except those parts that like noise and viscera. And it is only playing to men - women are entirely secondary to the plot - they are objects and pawns which men have to put into play even though they don't want to, and (according to the script) they are even described as liars and even monkeys (!?). This is basically a film about who has the biggest set of genitals, in which who owns the women is a badge of who wins.
And as ever, when the dick takes over, the brain takes a back seat...
Tom Cruise and John Woo, two of the most compelling figures in the world of film, have teamed up for M:I-2, a romantic action thriller that plunges sp...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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