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Mission: Impossible 2
(***)
As far as action goes, Mission: Impossible 2 is a non-stop ride. This is a franchise that is going to continue for a long while, I'm sure. It's doing successfully what only James Bond has done in the past; create a franchise in which the plot is only a line on which to drape a lot of really spectacular action sequences. I loved nearly every minute of it.
Ethan Hunt is interrupted on his vacation for a mission. A group of terrorists have smuggled a virus out of Australia, and one of them is a former IMF agent named Sean Ambrose (Scott). Hunt's mission, should he choose to accept it, is to find Ambrose's former girlfriend Nyah Hall (Newton), a master thief hanging around somewhere in Europe.
The plot hardly matters; many can see a lot of the parallels to Hitchcock's "Notorious", in which Cary Grant is charged to find Claude Rains' former mistress, but he falls in love himself and is forced to send her into his enemy's arms. The plot is just a detail; what matters here is the effects. A fast-paced car chase, motorcycle battles, and martial arts style fights to the death. It's all in good fun.
I attended this movie with someone who disagrees, and says that the motorcycle sequences were too drawn out, and that they defied the laws of physics anyway. He is of course forgetting the first rule of film; it's not the "what", it's the "how". Any film creates its own rules. To cite unbelievability would be foolhardy; it really doesn't matter that motorcycles can't really move the way they move, nor does it matter that Ambrose keeps getting up. We know that a lot of those kicks and punches would kill anyone, now we just accept and enjoy what's on the screen.
The only returning member of the original movie (besides Tom Cruise) is Ving Rhames, as IMF agent Luther Stickell, and it's his character that's defining the rules of Mission: Impossible for the coming years. No longer is a suave agent roaming through casinos; now our agents are out on the field, and we don't know who they are because they might not even be wearing their own faces. Instead for asking for a martini, they are able to tell you exactly how their computers run. Although I don't see James Bond fading away, Ethan Hunt won't be leaving anytime soon.
That is a good thing. I think I'm the only one I know who enjoyed 1996's Mission: Impossible. Too many people cited it as being unbelievable; with too many plot twists. Wrong and wrong. The plot was more complex than was necessary, but believability is a red herring. However, such a complex plot hindered Mission: Impossible for the movie going public, and its sequels have no such problems.