Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

★★★
Mission: Impossible 2 is a glorious marriage of Hollywood action and John Woo's heroic bloodshed style from Hong Kong. Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner hit the jackpot in recruiting the legendary director, who was hot off the success of Face/Off and looking for his next big challenge. He found it with the second installment in the blockbuster series. Working from a solid script by Robert Towne and a game Tom Cruise who was up for anything, Woo crafted this splendid thriller with secret agents, heists, disguises, deception and some of the most visually arresting action scenes in the director's oeuvre. Lest this appear as a movie focused solely on its style and sacrificing substance, rest assured that that is not the case. The plot is engaging in its own right, and the chemistry between Cruise and costar Thandie Newton is a highlight of the show. There are the quieter moments that remind us of Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, and then there are amped up shootouts and chases that unmistakably have Woo's fingerprints all over them.

Dr. Vladimir Nekhorvich (Rade Šerbedžija) injects himself with a virus and smuggles it out of his employer's labs in Sydney. He travels with his contact Dimitri on the flight to Atlanta, but the pilot hijacks the plane and Dimitri reveals himself to be I.M.F. agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) wearing an Ethan Hunt mask, since Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) had been communicating with Dr. Nekhorvich prior to this. Sean has gone rogue. He steals the cure (dubbed Bellerophon), which the doctor was carrying in his briefcase, not knowing that the doc injected himself with the virus (dubbed Chimera). Sean and his team escape before the plane crashes, and thus Ethan's mission becomes clear: find the cure and uncover Sean's motives for turning his back on the I.M.F. Before he heads for Sydney, Ethan will recruit the members of his team. Returning is Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), while newcomer Billy Baird (John Polson) rounds out the official I.M.F. members. The first part of Hunt's assignment is also to recruit thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton), who once had a relationship with Ambrose and can get close to him to discover his plan.

Sean's traitorous motives eventually become clear. He wants to unleash Chimera on an unsuspecting public and profit from the sale of Bellerophon, which could earn him billions. His greed kicks off a tale that will include neat spy gadgets, a superb bit of trickery at a horse track and a heist sequence that ends in a ballet of bullets. More than that, the contest between Sean and Ethan turns personal. The animosity builds up gradually as they trade leads in the race to the finish line. Towards the end, Ethan pulls off a deception so masterful that I was genuinely stunned by how well executed it was. This leads to a raw, unrelenting showdown between the hero and the villain. John Woo deploys every trick in the book to accomplish it. The slow-motion shots, the music (reminiscent of how Woo used music in the final shootout in The Killer) to evoke rage, the framing—it's all stylistic excess for the pleasure of watching stylistic excess. The scene drips with their anger for one another.

The story itself is less convoluted this time around. It's complex and has lots of moving parts, but Woo is more focused on a cohesive tale and allowing the individual parts to support a strong narrative. De Palma wanted us to appreciate his movie in pieces. He wanted us to feel something specific about the moment. He had been doing that his whole career. The slow build to the climax in Carrie, the tunnel scene in Body Double—these feel isolated from the rest of the story, but the moment grabs us all the same. Woo's approach is different. De Palma's heist ends in victory, but Ethan sure had to work for it. Woo's heist fails, but Ethan and Sean come away from it with a mutual dislike for one another that will boil over, and that's after a shootout in which Tom Cruise must have felt privileged to join the list of actors who held a gun in each hand in a John Woo movie. Now he can stand alongside Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and others who looked great doing the same. Not bad company.

Tom Cruise is, of course, at the center of the film. Through convincing computer-assisted manipulation, he performs stunts and fight moves that not even Jackie Chan could perform (or maybe he could). Practical effects have their place too. Ethan Hunt's reintroduction comes to us by way of a free climb up a mountain that was accomplished with minimal safety precautions. Cruise's dedication to stunt authenticity would continue well into the new millennium, much to our everlasting appreciation. Dougray Scott makes a suitably deranged villain. His character has all the trademarks of the traditional Bond villain: a luxury home, a fortified base, loyal soldiers, a complete lack of empathy for the general population. More than most of Ethan's adversaries, Sean knows which buttons to push to infuriate his opponent. Thandie Newton, playing thief Nyah, brings a low-key presence to the proceedings. Ethan evolves into an action hero in this film, but Nyah keeps things grounded with her pickpocket skills and ability to play the undercover role.

John Woo's Hollywood career didn't last much longer after this. His decade-long stint could be described as a mixed bag, but that's really no fault of his own. Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2 are his most memorable contributions, and he gave us one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's best films in Hard Target. The early experiment to let a different director helm each installment of this series made for some tonally distinct entries, but there is never a sense that each entry exists in a bubble. De Palma brought his expectation for audience patience with the promise of reward (which he fulfilled), while Woo depended less on patience and wanted us to be in awe of his character's balletic movements amid fisticuffs and bullets. Part 3's J.J. Abrams will bring his own talents to the table. The constant is Ethan Hunt, a hero who will take on each challenge no matter how dangerous each one gets. There isn't a building too high or a plane too fast for him to tackle.

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