This is a decent enough mindless action movie with a lot of over the top action but it is not really a Mission Impossible movie. The movie starts of reasonably well being somewhat intelligent with a bit of Mission Impossible feel to it. It is actually almost a bit slow at times. However, for the second half of the movie it really degrades into a classical John Woo, over the top, action feast with all pretense of intelligence and any true Mission Impossible feel gone. John Woo is not the right person to make a Mission Impossible movie.
As with the first movie if it would not have been labelled Mission Impossible I would probably have given it a higher rating since it is a decent enough, mostly braindead though, Hollywood action movie. However, I have higher expectations from a movie labelled Mission Impossible.
Tom Cruise is quite okay as Ethan Hunt. Dougray Scott is okayish as the bad guy. Sometimes he projects the right big bad and mad bad-guy attitude but sometimes he is just silly and just as over the top as the action scenes. He is supposed to be a mastermind but he comes out as a thug a’ la a not so intelligent drug baron in many scenes.
The action scenes? Well, they are classical John Woo material. Fast paced with a lot of stunts and things that go boom. They are also, as expected, hugely over the top and unbelievable. They provide a enjoyable visual experience but, as I wrote above, they are not really what I would expect from a Mission Impossible movie.
The romance between Hunt and Nyah is the typical Hollywood, let’s throw in a sexy girl and some superficial attraction, which develops from get lost to I love you in the matter of a few hours of contact, between the lead character and the girl. Meh!
I get the impression that the people that have created these movies so far have not really watched a single full season of Mission Impossible.
And now we're on to the first casualty of the major studios' new millennium rush to making everything in movies sleeker, sexier, and completely fucking stupid. Sure, the technology in the first Cruise Mission: Impossible was well...impossible for the most part; but it still hovered around "plausible" territory for late 90s tech.
This movie, though, dove head-first into the Y2K aesthetic craze along with the Y2K shit music craze: Limp Bizkit being hired for the theme was a bigger tragedy than John Woo's expertise being wasted on this 2000 schlock fest.
I always love how William Mapother -- Tom Cruise's cousin -- has a real Charlie Pace from Lost vibe going on in he plane scene. Which is fitting, since Mapother played the villainous "Other" Ethan on Lost.
Overall, the entire plot is dumber than any plot should be in a movie with "Mission: Impossible" in its title, but it does have its upsides: Thandie Newton being her fine self, and Dougray Scott not being able to play Logan/Wolverine in the first X-Men, leading to the best recast of all time; an ironically Aussie actor named Hugh while Dougray Scott was stuck in Australia recovering from an injury caused during this movie's stupid motorcycle leap.
But at least we got Anthony Hopkins delivering a very dryly sarcastic, "Well, this is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt. It's Mission Impossible"
"How many people are capable of something like that?" Not to be a Debbie Downer, Nyah, but give it about 16 months, and the world will find out.
Thank God the bad guys put a timer on the bomb for Luther's van that corresponded to exactly how much time he'd need to get out of the van and to reach Ethan... oh, look, the giant explosion that would've killed anyone that close to it was just small enough to spare Luther.
Oh, look, Ethan has his Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans "Just stay alive, I will cure you!" moment.
And here come the John Woo pigeons! Oh, and the totally non-divine white dove for the least subtle visual metaphor ever! Thank God the movie Swiss banking system user interface is this blatant with all the fun late-90s HTML graphics, or else the audience might've been confused about this "I'm not good at computers" money transfer.
And for the second Mission: Impossible movie in a row, the villains who relied on the IMF's impossible mask technology several times in the movie weren't suspicious of the possibility of being fooled that way...
Here comes O Fortuna, the Koyaanisqatsi of Nutcracker Christmas movie scores.
Luther, from a helicopter with more than enough time to make an easy shot can't, but Ethan on a motorcycle on a different road can hit both a shooter and their car's tire and pull a Morpheus to blow it the fuck up. And, once again, he's a better shot while aiming behind him than Sean was just moments earlier. Oh, look, both their motorcycles suddenly have sand tires; how convenient.
And now we come to the injury-causing stunt that cost Scott the role of Wolverine.
*producer rips a fat line of coke:* what if Ethan and Sean play a game of motorcycle chicken...BUT both of them leap off their bikes at the exact same moment and collide with each midair? Fuckin' sick, right? John Woo: Get this man a raise immediately!
And now for another game of "Which long-haired pretty boy in all black is Ethan?" Oh, and there's the cheek cut for the poster! Hey, Ethan, you might have an easier time killing Sean if you didn't need to do such stylized kicks every four seconds.
Welp, Ethan's team may not have done exactly as instructed, but this might be the only Cruise Mission: Impossible movie where they didn't go rogue and have half the world's governments trying to capture them.
I know Cruise/Wagner and Paramount wanted to go in a completely different direction for the 1996's sequel, but this may have been a bit of an over-correction. I don't hate it as much as I used to, if only because it is stupid fun. Wasn't worth paying to see it in theaters 24 years ago (ugh), but it's a good time-killer if you want some very dumb fun.
1/10
Weak Source
and just plain
SUCKED.
THIS WAS SO BORING, ABSOLUTELY RUBBISH AND THE WORST ONE OF THE FRANCHISE.
NOTHING HAPPENED FOR
95 PERCENT OF THE MOVIE
AND BY THE END WHEN THINGS WENT DOWN
I JUST DIDN'T GIVE A SHIT
AND WHATS WITH ALL THE SLOW MO
CRAP SHOVED IN FOR NO GOOD REASON
IT WAS SO OUT OF PLACE.
I JUST WANTED IT OVER AND DONE WITH.
IT TOOK ME A STRAIGHT 2 DAYS TO GRIND
MY WAY THROUGH THIS COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. IT'S LIKE THEY RUN OUT OF IDEAS FOR A SECOND MOVIE, SO THEY STRUNG TOGETHER THIS
CASH GRAB. THE STORY WAS SO GENERIC AND SLOW TO THE POINT IT LIMPED OVER THE FINISH LINE AT THE END. SPEAKING OF, THAT END FIGHT WAS
SO DRAGGED OUT AND BORING AND MADE
NO SENSE WITH CONVENIENT STUFF
JUST HAPPENS TO HAPPEN,
TOTAL CRAP AND I EXPECT FAR MORE AND BETTER.
IN THE END I WAS JUST ROOTING FOR THE BAD GUYS BECAUSE I KNEW THEY WOULD GIVE ME SOMETHING
ANYTHING. ONCE AGAIN ANOTHER
CONVOLUTED STORY THIS TIME AROUND
WITHOUT THE FUN AND ENTERTAINING QUALITIES.
THIS CRAP DEFINITELY OVERSTAYED IT'S
WELCOME.
HOW CAN THEY GET IT SO WRONG
WHEN THEY GOT IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME,
BECAUSE THIS WAS BAD AND I MEAN
REALLY BAD.
THIS WAS VERY NEARLY A
"MISSION IMPOSSIBLE"
To Sit Through And Complete.
(I did not choose to accept
being bored out of my mind
with this mission,
my brain nearly self destructed).
Review by JordyVIP 8BlockedParent2023-05-20T21:17:57Z
This is the most Y2K movie in existence. The excessive slow-mo, the drum ‘n bass influenced soundtrack, the dumb nu metal cover of the theme song, give me a break. It’s trying way too hard to be cool, and watching it now (or as someone with good taste in 2000, I’d imagine) you can’t help but laugh at these choices. The charm of the man who made Hard Boiled and Face Off is completely missing here, instead it feels like a film directed by a meathead. The action’s forgettable and poorly edited (e.g. why the cross fading during the opening car chase?), the plot and characters are disposable (also, why the love triangle?), there’s too much of a 007 influence creatively and it doesn’t even use its location to the fullest extent (why does so much of this take place in the suburbs?). I only really like some individual moments, for example the rock climbing scene is pretty memorable (despite being superfluous to the story) and there are some good stunts during the motorcycle chase. The cinematography is also decent, and some of the better actors in the cast elevate the material at least a little bit, but this is overall a complete misfire.
3.5/10