Mission: Impossible II

Mission: Impossible II

One clings vainly to the hope that one can count on Mission: Impossible II (or M:I 2 for my readers with advanced attention deficit disorder) to provide some mindless entertainment. M:I 2 is emphatically mindless (the balance of my readers, you three, can predict what's coming), however, it's such a worthless muddle that the only entertainment the viewer can derive will be from stomping to smithereens whatever wretched vehicle conveyed this incontinent drivel into your living room, including the actual cassette/dvd, player, car and driver.

When John Woo was wrapped in Hong Kong garments, with a simple plot and decent actors, he was on the verge of creating a new art form, the ultra-violent gun ballet.

Mercilessly thrown to the sharks of Hollywood and forced to work with the Dirty Three (a too well-known cadre of egotistic hacks with less acting talent combined than Dolph Sweet) Woo's become an enigma; the equivalent of directorial Tourette's Syndrome, a number of incomprehensible, meaningless stylistic tics in a pathetic lump.

To be fair, the Dirty Three (Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, for my sleepy readers) have done more than their fair share in bringing about Woo's downfall with their horrifying acting turns. "Look at me! I'm (fill in the blank)!" they seem to endlessly scream for two hours, at which point someone reminds them they're supposedly actors, causing them to sulk off and buy million dollar airplanes.

Cruise manages somehow to be the best actor of the three, occasionally, you can almost envision him believing he's the character he portrays, unfortunately the total absence of a trackable plot, the arid desert of roles and collage style editing ("hey guys, let's throw all this film stock on the floor and paste it where it lies!") mean even his paltry talents are utterly unable to raise M:I 2 above the level of aggravating headache.

To the best of my ability, I ascertain M:I 2 to concern the creation of a deadly flu strain, which will either: A. make a pharmaceutical company a lot of dough selling their experimental flu vaccines, (let me digress a bit here, at one point the drug company CEO seems to say he was forced to manufacture new flu strains to stimulate the market for his vaccines. HELLO? "Hi. I'm your average Joe, I'm not interested in any flu cures unless I know that there's a new deadly strain out there, otherwise, forget it, not interested, and I'm fine suffering through like always.") Man, I'm so sick of thinking about this movie that I'm giving up now. If your idea of drama involves slow-mo close-ups of men's faces during firefights, car chases so pointless and poorly cut it's impossible to tell what's going on, and the ubiquitous white dove following Cruise around (in case you forgot who the good guy was), then lap it up. But I pity you. M:I 2 is not only one of the worst films of 2000; it's one of the worst films of all time.