MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2
Handsomely produced sequel is enor mous fun to watch but instantly for gettable. The semi-coherent story — Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) trying to re cover a killer virus — isn’t much more than an excuse for director John Woo’s breathtaking set pieces, including a motorcycle duel that’s simply incredible.
Running time: 127 minutes. Rated PG-13. At the 42nd Street E Walk, the Orpheum, the Village East, others.
MISSION accomplished.
Director John Woo’s “Mission: Impossible 2” keeps audiences on the edge of their seats for much of its two-hour running time, lavishing enough thrills and eye candy to eclipse the fact it’s instantly forgettable.
The last half-hour — an extended motorcycle chase wherein Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt barrels through a wall of fire, firing bullets while riding on one wheel, capped by a kickboxing climax — is simply incredible.
Also enormous fun to watch is Ethan’s opening scene, where he’s seen dangling by his fingers off a sheer rockface in Utah, jumping in midair to another peak.
Also sure to get audiences pumped is a flirtatious mountain car chase between Ethan and Nyah Hall (Thandie Newton), the beautiful thief he recruits for his latest mission — keeping her ex-boyfriend, rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), from unleashing a killer virus.
Ethan falls in love with the light-fingered Nyah, but is forced to send her back into the arms of the psychopathic Sean — who registers his displeasure with an associate by using a cigar cutter on one of his fingers.
The screenplay –attributed to multiple Oscar-nominee Robert Towne but apparently the work of a high-priced committee — only half-heartedly follows through on the love-and-betrayal theme after a suspenseful racetrack sequence.
There are references to “North by Northwest” throughout the film, most notably Sean’s striking house in Sydney, where most of the film takes place.
“Mission: Impossible 2” also quotes liberally from Woo’s last American film, the more exhilarating “Face/Off,” which had much better acting and moved much more quickly throughout.
This sequel to the 1996 “Mission: Impossible” bogs down midway in lengthy exposition that doesn’t do much to explain why, for instance, Sean needed to blow up an airliner in the film’s opening moments.
Sean isn’t anywhere near as interesting a villain (or Scott as compelling an actor) as the bad guys in the first film, played by Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny.
Besides Cruise, only Ving Rhames as computer whiz Luther Stickell returns from the original cast, and he doesn’t have much to do beyond lowering Ethan from a helicopter into a microbiology lab, in a scene laboriously copied from a more suspenseful sequence in the original film.
Newton pretty much disappears from the second half of the film. Not that there’s much chemistry between her and Cruise, whose Ethan seems much too self-absorbed to connect with anyone else.
Cruise, who overplays the scenes in which Ethan is supposed to be concerned about Nyah’s fate, looks less like a covert operative than a fashion model, with stylish long hair and designer clothes complementing his impossibly chiseled looks.
At one point a character asks, “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?” Much of the time you won’t, but check your brains at the popcorn stand and hang on for a spectacular ride.