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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Director John Woo's pyrotechnics and the spark between Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton can't redeem a strangely impersonal actioner.
May 24, 2000 | The opening scenes of "M:I-2" have the luxe travel-brochure allure that's been missing from the Bond movies for years. The director, John Woo, and his cinematographer, Jeffrey L. Kimball, give Seville, Spain, a slightly humid, candlelit beauty. Everything on-screen looks as if it was put there to seduce you. By the time Tom Cruise, reprising his role as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, and Thandie Newton, as the top thief he's been ordered to recruit for his latest mission, start giving each other the eye across a room of flamenco dancers, the attraction between them just seems to be a result of breathing the air.
But Cruise and Newton both have a lot to do with that spark. Cruise reveals a lascivious playfulness he's never shown before. He stretches out fully clothed in a bathtub while Newton straddles him as she picks a lock, and his smile is so openly carnal that you can't help laughing. And Newton is a knockout -- brainy and witty and so warm that the amber glow of these scenes might be coming off her caramel skin.
If the movie had made a place for these two to carry on their flirtation amid the pyrotechnics we know are coming, "M:I-2" might have been consistently sexy fun. Woo has always been something of a romantic (you don't make movies preoccupied with heroism and codes of honor if you aren't) and he seems to take real pleasure in the scenes between Cruise and Newton, maybe because they're just about the first real love scenes he's ever had a chance to film. But the plot calls for Newton to reconnect with old flame Dougray Scott, an IMF agent turned baddie, in order to infiltrate his plan to obtain a deadly virus and sell it to the highest bidder.
Screenwriter Robert Towne (who gets screen credit for a script that was also worked on by Wesley Strick, William Goldman and Michael Tolkin) may have lifted that from Hitchcock's "Notorious," where agent Cary Grant has to watch as Ingrid Bergman, the woman he loves, marries Nazi Claude Rains. But Towne hasn't written the script to focus on Cruise's sexual jealousy (which he plays well, when he gets to play it) or Newton's repugnance at having to bed down with a man she despises (ditto).
It's not that "M:I-2" is badly made. It would be hard to find a Woo film that is. The man is an absolute wizard at action scenes. In the climax he stages a motorcycle chase and then a hand-to-hand combat scene between Cruise and Scott that are marvels of hairbreadth timing. And as fast as they are, they are very cleanly shot. There's not a second where you can't follow the action or not tell where the characters are in relation to each other. At one point, a frenzied bit of fighting abruptly halts in a spectacular shot of a knife's point stopping just millimeters from Cruise's eye, and the sudden shock of it makes you gasp. The action sequences in "M:I-2" are so clear and well made they stand virtually alone among all the clichéd camera-shaking sequences littering up screens in other action movies.
But even the most spectacular things Woo unleashes here feel strangely impersonal. The pleasure of Woo's Hong Kong films wasn't just seeing someone beat Hollywood at its own game, it was seeing a filmmaker operating free of the post-everything irony that's infected movies. "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled" were pictures made by someone who hadn't heard that audiences had gotten too hip for old-fashioned plots, so they seemed weirdly innocent. But it's hard for a filmmaker to retain that kind of freshness when operating in the hyper-calculated atmosphere of Hollywood. In his last picture, "Face/Off," Woo triumphed seemingly by dint of sheer perversity; the movie operated as a grand grotesque joke and a hall of mirrors for its two stars, John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
