Mission: Rewatchable - 'Mission: Impossible 2'

Revisit John Woo's 'Mission' in advance of 'The Final Reckoning.'

This essay was originally published in 2023, shortly before the release of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opening this week, it seemed like a good time to revisit it. Enjoy!

There's this very bad romantic comedy from 2001 called America's Sweethearts about a movie star couple splitting up. And because it's a movie about movies, it has a lot of clips from fake films. And because it's trying to be a satire, those clips are dumb. And because it's a very broad satire, those clips are really dumb. Not, like, fake Bruce Willis/Julia Roberts movie from The Player dumb. Not parody trailers from Tropic Thunder dumb. Not even fictional Adam Sandler movies from Funny People dumb (Jesus, talk about putting a hat on a hat). Like. DUMB. To such a degree that there's just no reality to them - no one would ever make one of these movies.

Except someone kinda did, a year earlier, and that someone was revered Hong Kong action auteur John Woo, and that movie was Mission: Impossible 2. WOOF. This dog has fleas, dude. If someone deliberately set out to lampoon Mission: Impossible movies AND John Wood movies AND turn of the century action movies, they could not have done a better job (it's hard to believe that composer Hans Zimmer didn't realize his "hip" rock version of Lalo Schifrin's famous theme music would come off as comedically lame).

The biggest problem here is tonal inconsistency. The movie kinda posits itself as a jaunty romantic thriller (it literally name-checks To Catch a Thief) and a fun summer popcorn movie (the soundtrack prominently features both a terrible Limp Bizkit song and a terrible Metallica song). But a large portion of it depends on one lover asking the other to prostitute themselves, and the MacGuffin is a horrible bioweapon, the effects of which are graphically portrayed on screen. Those three things just don't go together. If there is a way to blend The Thomas Crown Affair with The Little Drummer Girl and Outbreak, Woo and his collaborators did not find it (the screenplay is once again credited to Robert Towne, this time working from a story by frequent Star Trek writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, the latter of whom also went on to oversee the reboot of Battlestar Galactica).

The movie also looks cheap. I know it wasn't cheap (it had a reported budget of $125 million, which, adjusted for inflation, is more like $225 million). But it LOOKS cheap. Woo and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball (Jacob's Ladder, True Romance) had both made good-looking movies before, but to be perfectly candid, a lot of M:I2 looks like shit (even Woo's signature doves look fake). Everything is brightly-lit and lacking in contrast, so the images tend to look very flat - like this is one big television movie and not an actual theatrical release. And then you have these little moments - like some guys leaping out of the hatch of a plane into a green screen landscape, with no exterior plane shots of stuntmen doing the jump for real - that inadvertently scream "budget limitations."

Woo also has a natural tendency to direct actors to go really BIG and operatic (the exception being Anthony Hopkins, who shows up briefly as Ethan's boss, and seems to be fighting to stay awake). The director's best work is, if not exactly dark, then certainly moody. He was hired for this movie off the back of Face/Off, which opens with the murder of a child and features a hero so fueled by rage that he's alienated his wife and daughter; the protagonists of his most famous Hong Kong flicks, The Killer and Hard Boiled, are similarly angsty. But this level of histrionics against a backdrop of depthless, brightly-colored imagery only serves to worsen the feeling that you're watching a lousy soap opera. The best actors in the cast, like Thandie Newton, Brendan Gleeson, and Ving Rhames, push through, but most of the performers come off pretty badly. Dougray Scott, playing the heavy, is especially awful. How can you chew the scenery this much AND be this bland?

(Incidentally, this movie is accidentally responsible for Hugh Jackman becoming a huge star - Scott was supposed to play Wolverine in Bryan Singer's X-Men after this, but he got injured filming the motorcycle chase and had to drop out. A couple of years earlier, Scott also had his entire subplot cut from the movie Deep Impact, leaving him visible in only a handful of shots. He was also rumored to have been up for James Bond at one point. The poor dude's career may be cursed.)

Adding to that bargain-basement feeling is the fact that, in contrast to modern Mission movies, most of Tom Cruise's stunts are patently fake. Like, yeah, he has to jump hout of helicopters and tall buildings, but they're very clearly green screen shots; there's also a big motorcycle jump where the rider is very clearly Cruise's stunt double. Today, Cruise would do all that shit for real. The Christopher McQuarrie entries in the franchise retroactively make Mission: Impossible 2 look even worse than it already is.

That might matter less if the story wasn't all-caps STUPID, but it is. Granted, these aren't exactly Bergman films. But still. This is next-level. They do the whole Mission: Impossible "Surprise! It wasn't who you thought it was, it was another guy in a mask!" schtick no less than four times. They kidnap a pharmaceutical executive (Gleeson) and trick him into thinking he has the virus and is in a hospital and they trick him into believing this scientist (Rade Šerbedžija, fresh off working with Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut) who has been killed is still alive, and the two have this entire conversation, and then they trick the exec AGAIN, this time into believing it was all a dream, but he's never the least-bit suspicious. And the story really depends on making you believe that Ethan and a thief named Nylah (Newton) fall deeply in love after knowing each other for a few hours.

There's a number of reasons why that romance doesn't work, not least of which is that it's devoid the moral ambiguity that gives these kind of hero/anti-hero movie relationships frisson. Ethan needs Nylah to get back together with her psychotic ex (Scott) for the sake of the mission, but he doesn't manipulate or blackmail her into doing that, because that might make the character "unlikable" - so instead he talks her into it by saying "Let your conscience be your guide" (in other words, she needs to fuck this awful dude to save the world). And Nylah, in turn, replies, "I'm a thief, I don't have a conscience," but then immediately agrees to do what Ethan wants, thereby disproving her own assertion and robbing her of the opportunity to have an arc.

Furthermore, Ethan and Nylah have the two most amateurish dialogue exchanges in the movie. The first occurs when Ethan is trying to talk Nylah into weaponizing her body. "Would it make you feel better if I said I didn't want you to do it?" he asks her. After she replies in the affirmative, he screams, "THEN FEEL BETTER!" That's romance, folks!!

The second comes later in the movie, when Nylah injects herself with this horrible virus specifically so the bad guys won't get it, and this exchange happens:

ETHAN

What did you think you were doing?!?!

NYLAH

I wasn't thinking! Just trying to stop you from getting hurt, that's all!!

ETHAN

You, who don't have a conscience.

NYLAH

I guess I lied!

And if you think the delivery of "I guess I lied" is playful or flirty, think again. This moment is played for deadly seriousness, but it sounds like it was taken from an episode of Saved by the Bell. We already know Nylah has a conscience because she agreed to be part of this mission, but if we missed that little detail somehow, we now really know it because she has risked her own life by giving herself the virus. But the painfully literal-minded and condescending "I guess I lied!" is still there. I suppose the filmmakers thought they audience wouldn't understand that she lied if she didn't say as much? Maybe this movie was designed specifically for hospital patients suffering from horrible brain trauma?

(They really did do Newton dirty here. There's a scene early on where Nylah straddles Ethan while she cracks open a safe. Newton gets her close-up, but the reverse shot, of Ethan lying beneath her, is framed in such a way that her exposed cleavage takes up about a quarter of the screen. I appreciate Newton's talent and her physical attributes as much as anyone, but the shot is cringe-worthy.)

Woo didn't even do anything fun with the gunfights - usually his forte! He tries to inject the film with his favorite thematic element - that being the duality of Man - by naming the virus 'Chimera' and the antidote 'Bellerophon,' by having the villain be a former IMF agent who literally "doubled" for Ethan, and by having Šerbedžija repeat the line "Every search for a hero must begin with something which every hero requires - a villain" on three separate occasions. But that makes no sense (this isn't an origin story - isn't Ethan already a hero?), and the relationship between Ethan and his adversary is never fleshed out enough for it to work regardless. Unlike in Face/Off, these characters' hatred for one another isn't rooted in the deeply personal (the mostly seem to dislike one another the way a school bully dislikes the hall monitor), and they barely get any scenes together.

The McQuarrie-directed installments of the series have included a number of callbacks to the pre-McQuarrie movies. But no one ever mentions the events or characters in Mission: Impossible 2, and save for Cruise and Rhames, no members of the cast were ever brought back for subsequent adventures. There's a reason for that.