-- Tuesday 6th February 2001, 1400 hours Freshney Place Grimsby, UK --
A 21 year old mouthshutter by the handle of OctoberSwimmer is browsing around minding his own business when for some strange reason these words are playing in his head ’’OctoberSwimmer, your mission if you choose to accept it is simple, approach your local branch of WHSmith and take advantage of their 3 for £40 DVD offer, however you must ensure that one of those 3 DVD’s is Mission Impossible 2 and it is imperative that you return with the DVD to home-base and play the disc, this offer will self-destruct in 5 weeks’’.
Almost instinctively OctoberSwimmer heads towards the DVD section fighting off a group of school-children who should be some place else, going into a tactical head to head with the mandatory fat guy who seems to appear at every DVD section in the land to gain access to this offer. slowly he goes searching for his titles, theres Dogma, theres Any Given Sunday now where is it, ah the last copy of MI2, he races towards the copy knowing that the above mentioned fat guy (whos so obviously evil) has eyes for the very same disc, success DVD in hand he heads to the counter and sneaks out 2 £20 notes before rushing home with his bounty, the following is his report into what he saw........
File DVDMI2
Storyline: Well, where shall I begin, there isn’t much of a storyline really, sure theres a mission here that has to be dealt with but its not that strong a storyline, however for once I’m going to let it slide as its an action film and action films don’t need much of a storyline as long as theres a few decent explosions, however for the purposes of these records heres a brief outlook of what the storyline is - Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has yet another mission to take on this time he needs to take on an old arch-rival Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) with the help of Nyah Hall (Thandie Newton). Whats happened? well quick rundown again, Ambrose used to be an agent the same as Hunt however hes turned his back on one mission and run off with a secret virus and cure that could make him millions, of course this is where Hunt comes into it, he gets the mission from his superiors and is ordered to recruit Hall into helping. Once he has finally recruited Hall we find out that her part in the mission is simple, with her being an ex-girlfriend of Ambrose she needs to regain his trust and act as a spy, reporting everything back to Hunt, however I have been given strict instructions by my superiors at MS5 (Instead of MI5 of course) to avoid giving away too much of the storyline so this part of the report ends here.
Acting: Classic Cruise style, plenty of dangerous stunts whilst not putting one hair off his head out of place, but onto the full performances :-
Cruise - As mentioned above a stunning performance from the man with the untouchable hair, I mean don’t ask me why but personally I can’t stand Tom Cruise however watching this movie you could honestly believe in the character he was playing and put the fact that it was actually Tom Cruise on screen straight to the back of your mind
Scott - Another evil Scottish character (maybe they’re trying to tell us something, if you’re a scottish reader that was my vain attempt at humour), but once again the character so believable that you find yourself hating the character and wishing nasty things towards him. Whenever Scott is on screen there seems to be a chill go through the air as you try and second guess what is going to happen now.
Newton - Wooden, there you go I’ve said it, sorry Thandie but you were definitely the weak link in this film, every time she appeared the film seemed to go on a downward spiral maybe it was the overly British accent or the fact that she really didn’t look as if she was a thief more a piece of ’eye-candy’ to attract a few more viewers, mind you with a script like this it must be hard to put a good performance in.
Others - well of course it isn’t 2 hours of these 3 people here, Anthony Hopkins makes a short appearance as Hunt’s superiors, and pulls it off quite well on top of this its your regular action movie cast - theres the Russian guy with the dodgy accent, the support team for the hero (Hunt) and the evil henchmen of the bad guy (Ambrose) and well, they try but really they don’t have that much of a part to make too much of an impact on the movie.
Effects: Here we go, this is where the film excels, its an action film so it has to have good effects but these are top notch as always with John Woo films, tonnes of explosions great action sequences and gun-fights to die for (and believe me they do). Its obvious that a lot of money, time and effort has gone into making this all seem realistic and its paid off big time.
Boom, Bang, Kablam all of these sounds and many more as Cruise and co explode their way from millions of dollars worth of props, but hey its Mission Impossible and all that money is definitely worth it seeing as the scenes are always relevant to what little storyline has been told.
Music: Well its an action movie so of course we’re going to need a healthy section of Rock music with a hint of classical music for when the storyline starts to get a little bit emotional.
Well the Rock music is definitely there with the two biggest examples being Metallica’s ’I Disappear’ and Limp Bizkit’s ’Now I know why you wanna hate me’ along with a variety of un-named pieces that stick in the mind whilst the cast do their thing.
Classical music, well its kept minimal mainly because it doesn’t have that much of a storyline to attach the music to, what little we have is done well and always seems appropriate.
So all told its a good score of music, again its an action movie and it needs external elements to keep it going and well this lot does its jon good enough for me.
Overall we have an average movie puffed up with tonnes of extras (not DVD extras, thats a whole different review) such as the music the explosions and so forth, its a John Woo movie so of course its all done in a very stylish way and if thats the sort of thing that rings your bell then by all means give it a go however if you don’t like the big-bang style that I’ve talked about here then I would definitely give it a miss.