Archives: A
- E F - N O
- Z Message
Boards
Your Donations feed us
BLU-RAY DVDs:
10,000 BC
Batman Begins
Black Hawk Down
Blade Runner
Cars
Casino Royale
Cloverfield
Enchanted
Fifth Element
Hellboy
Chronicles of Narnia
I Am Legend
Ice Age
Incredible HULK
Independence Day
I, Robot
Iron Man
Juno
Kill Bill 1 & 2
Men in Black
National Treasure
National Treasure 2
No Country for Old Men
Persepois
Pirates: Dead Man's Chest
Pirates: At World's End
Rambo box set
Ratatouille
Spiderwick Chronicles
Sleeping Beauty
Terminator
Terminator 2
Top Gun
Total Recall
300
Ultimate Matrix coll
V for Vendetta
Wall-E
We're Kidlet Safe
Search engine
by FreeFind
click to search site
Now in Release:
Australia
Battle in Seattle
Cadillac Records
Bolt
The Duchess
The Express
Four Christmases
Frost/Nixon
Ghost Town
Happy Go Lucky
Kabluey
Max Payne
Milk
Pride and Glory
Punisher War Zone
Quantum of Solace
Righteous Kill
The Rocker
Role Models
Sex Drive
Slumdog Millionaire
Soul Men
W.
What Just Happened
DVDs on Sale:
300
10,000 B.C.
Alice
in Wonderland
An American in Paris
Batman
Begins
Bambi
Beauty
and the Beast
Blade
Runner (dir. cut)
Bourne Ultimatum
Cinderella
E.T.
Fantastic Four 2
Forrest
Gump
Gone
With the Wind
Harry
Potter yrs 1-3 set
Harry
Potter Azkaban
Alfred Hitchcock set
In Bruges
Indiana
Jones trilogy
The Kingdom
Knocked Up (unrated)
Lars and the Real Girl
Lawrence of Arabia
The
Lion King
Lord
of Rings 12 discs
Mary
Poppins 40th LE
Marx Bros set
Ultimate
Matrix set
Monty
Python - Grail
Nancy Drew
Pirates of Caribbean 3
Persepolis
Ratatouille
Saw IV (unrated)
Shrek Trilogy
Simpsons Movie
Sin
City
Sleeping
Beauty
South
Park Movie
Spider-Man Trilogy
Spiderwick Chronicles
Star
Wars Ep. 1
Star
Wars Ep. 2
Star
Wars Ep. 3
Star
Wars Trilogy (4-6)
X-Men Trilogy
Looney
Toons Golden Age
Volume
1
Volume
2
Volume
3
Volume 4
Volume 5
Rocky & Bullwinkle
Season
1
Season
2
Season
3
Popeye the Sailor
v.1 1933 - 1938
v.2 1938 - 1940
75th anniversary coll.ed.
Star
Trek TOS
Star
Trek TNG
Star
Trek Films
 click for full sized poster |
Mission: Impossible 2
Starring Tom Cruise |
Cranky's review. Click here for Paul Fischer's review
IN SHORT: An average John Woo flick. [Rated PG-13, 125 minutes]
"Good morning Mr. Hunt (Tom Cruise). The picture you see is a Dr. Nekhorvich (Radé Sherbedgia) of Biocyte Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Nekhorvich was killed in a plane crash while on his way to deliver something to us. We don't know what but it's really dangerous. IM agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) was on the plane, too, and we haven't found the body. We're not sure where he is, if he's screwed us, or exactly what your mission is, other than to stop something really nasty from happening. We're sure you'll figure it out along the way. Oh, you can only use two agents and you must include a civilian thief named Nyah Hall (Thandie Newton) on the team. We know we're not supposed to configure your team, but we can discuss that when you come over and discuss the matter in person with us (Anthony Hopkins). If you or any member of you IM team should be caught or killed, yada yada yada. Have a nice day."
With all the baggage of the past buried and forgotten, John Woo takes up the director's reigns, overseeing the one-man strike force that is Ethan Hunt, leader of the Impossible Mission "team," in Mission: Impossible 2. Woo, whose visual sense can make a boy giddy, lets loose with both barrels and all the visual fireworks he can put on the big screen. That's a good thing 'cuz the M:I2 script stinks. Like its big screen predecessor this flick has very little in common with the television series it is based upon, other than a self-destructing set of instructions and characters pulling rubber mask disguises off their faces. We don't compare to Source Material. Fans of the series can figure out what's different from the paragraph above.
Then again, it's summertime, when all most of us want out of a movie is onscreen fireworks and a reason to plunge our mitts into the extra-large-super-sized popcorn up to our elbows. M:I2 delivers that in spades, refusing to cut fight scenes that run on too long, resorting to makeup gimmicks instead of developing a great story and, in short, refusing to roll over and play dead when its story was done. It's almost as if the writers and Woo sat down and figured out what would be really cool to do and which really cool bits would be even cooler if shot in slow motion, and then wrote the script around them. That means a motorcycle duel, a half naked Cruise on a rock and the gun in the sand bits that are in the teevee commercial, and a wee bit of "aerobatic insanity" that reprises something in the last flick and which had the audience happily giggling.
Absolutely giddy. Myself included. I told you.
If you're a novice to the concept, the IM is a secret force that manipulates situations to bring about conclusions that punish the evil guys and ensure that truth, justice and the American way win out. In this case, it's the story of one renegade agent and his possession of an artificially created strain of influenza that could devastate the world. The "good" IM team -- our heroes include Ving Rhames, the only returnee from M:I1 and John Polson as an almost utterly dispensable guy with an Australian accent, useful since the film is set in Australia -- must track and destroy another -- Richard Roxbury is the muscle on bad guy Ambrose's side -- using the civilian and a small tracking device implanted in Newton's ankle, as bait. The notion of one IM team against another one is a good one. The problem is that one team leader knows all about the moves of the other, and not vice versa. The bad guys also have all the IM technology, so how they miss the tracking device is news to me.
No, it's not. It's scriptwriters ignoring the obvious. It's scriptwriters ignoring what they've written earlier in the script. But, just as in the last flick, this series is not so much about the story as it is about Ethan Hunt, $20 million dollar action figure. That being the case, Tom Cruise is absolute dynamite in black clothing. He makes a great John Woo movie action toy. The action sequences, as in everything John Woo does, are the reason to lay out hard cash to see the flick. Bullets fly. Explosions, um, explode. Cruise does unbelievable physical things believably and gets a love interest to boot. So the hell with history and any requirement of logic in the script.
Buy the extra big popcorn and stick to the small soda. This sequel is less complicated than the last one, but if you have to make a quick run, you'll still miss something important.
On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Eight Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to Mission: Impossible 2, he would have paid...
$4.50
It's a summertime, popcorn dateflick. All sweetener and no nutritional value at all.
[... and Paramount Pictures showed MI:2 to the New York critics at the same time the Knicks and the Miami Heat faced off in Game 7 of the NBA Playoffs. New Yorker that I am, I went to the screening . . . the things I do for you people...]
 |
Click to buy films by John Woo |
| Click to buy films starring Tom Cruise | |
| Click to buy films starring Ving Rhames | |
| Click to buy films starring Anthony Hopkins |
|
|
BUY THE LATEST DVDs |
|
 Star Wars Trilogy (Widescreen) DVD (Full Screen) |
 Lord of the Rings Trilogy DVD |
 Marx Bros collection |
 Alfred Hitchcock Collection |
|
|
We're Kidlet Safe
Search engine
by FreeFind
click to search site
Now in
Release:
The Band's Visit
Definitely Maybe
Hottie and the Nottie
In Bruges
Iron Man
Be Kind Rewind
Rambo
Cloverfield
Mad Money
U2 3D
28 Weeks Later
Black
Book
Bourne Ultimatum
Brooklyn
Rules
Death at a Funeral
Evening
The
Ex
Fido
Georgia Rule
Grindhouse
Hairspray
Harry Potter - Phoenix
The Hoax
Hot Rod
I Know Who Killed Me
La Vie en Rose
License to Wed
Live
Free or Die Hard
Mr. Brooks
Next
No Reservatons
Ocean's Thirteen
Perfect Stranger
Pirates of Caribbean
Ratatouille
Rescue Dawn
Rush Hour 3
Severance
Sicko
Simpsons Movie
Slow Burn
Snow Cake
Spider-Man 3
Stardust
DVDs
on Sale:
300
Alice
in Wonderland
Batman
Begins
Bambi
Beauty
and the Beast
Blade
Runner
Bridge to Terabithia
Charlie
+ Chocolate Factory
Cinderella
E.T.
Fantastic
Four
Forrest
Gump
Gone
With the Wind
Harry
Potter yrs 1-3 set
Harry
Potter Azkaban
The
Incredibles
Indiana
Jones trilogy
The
Lion King
Lord
of Rings 12 discs
Mary
Poppins 40th LE
Ultimate
Matrix set
Miss Potter
Monty
Python - Grail
Napoleon
Dynamite
Pirates of the Caribbean
Pirates of the Caribbean 2
Shrek
Shrek
2
Sin
City
Sleeping
Beauty
South
Park Movie
Spider-Man
Spider-Man
2
Star
Wars Ep. 1
Star
Wars Ep. 2
Star
Wars 3 Full Screen
Star
Wars 3 l'box
Star
Wars Trilogy (4-6)
The
Island
War
of the Worlds
X-Men
X-Men
2