When director John Woo took the reins on the Mission Impossible franchise, he reinvented everything the first one had attempted to be. Injecting his signature style into the movie, Woo’s stab at this film offers ecstatic camera swoops and swishes, intense slow-mo and explosive martial arts action.
This impossible mission sees Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt recruiting Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton), in order for her to reconnect with her ex-lover and villain of the movie, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), who is after a deadly virus, Chimera. In Luther Stickell’s (Ving Rhames returning in the role) famous words, ‘it’s that simple’.
The film offers a romantic element into the mix, something that didn’t really feature in the first. Hunt and Nyah spend the first act of the film flirting and gallivanting around Seville together, only for Hunt to be informed she has been recruited so she can get back with Ambrose. Cruise and Newton have chemistry but it sets the film off in a rather dull manner. The only benefit is that, in a sort of twist, Newton almost takes the lead from Cruise - she is the one in danger, she is undercover and she is the one on the mission, with Hunt only serving as her backup for a large portion of the film.
When Hunt does return to the front and centre, Newton basically disappears from the story. Having infected herself with the last remaining sample of the virus, she is placed by Ambrose into the centre of Sydney in order to infect as many people as possible. This happens offscreen and we don’t catch up with Nyah until she is standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to kill herself. It’s a bizarre third-act choice for her character and the movie suffers from it.
That’s not to say the third act is bland. If anything, it steps up the action of the first film’s final sequence, featuring a motorcycle chase, a brutal fistfight, some nifty face mask tech and a tonne of pigeons. Hunt and Ambrose’s final martial arts influenced battle is done well and really strips the men to the basics.
This is clearly the weak link in the Mission Impossible chain, but it isn’t a bad film. Attempting to subvert the franchise before it had even found its groove was an odd choice and Woo’s style doesn’t quite click in all the right places.
Score: 59/100