Mission: Impossible II (2000)

Rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) and his team of rogues steal the lab-made disease “Chimera” a crazy Russian scientist made for an Australian pharma company. Given what happened in the first movie, the IMF seems to have a bit of a problem with rogue agents committing supervillainy.

Fortunately, still tiny, not quite as shouty anymore, super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, smugly grinning like a loon for the whole first act for reasons only known to himself; the movie even makes it part of its villain’s motivation instead of telling Tom to cut it out) is put on the case. Before really starting on the mission, he is supposed to recruit sexy jewel thief Nyah Hall (the artist now known as Thandiwe Newton). The recruitment is more like a short courtship dance, and before you can doubt anyone’s professionalism, they have already copulated and fallen for each other deeply (at least for this movie). Which gets a bit awkward when Ethan’s boss (an Anthony Hopkins cameo) explains that Nyah is a former girlfriend of Ambrose’s and supposed to help them via good old sexspionage instead of thievery.

That makes Hunt so grumpy, he’s going to stop grinning for the rest of the movie, so good job there, Anthony Hopkins. But needs must, so sexspionage it is. This being a Mission: Impossible movie, a heist and various action scenes are of course going to follow.

This being a John Woo movie, a misplaced pigeon, as well.

Four years after the first MI movie, Cruise has settled into his star persona, which leaves us with less strained attempts at acting and a leading man who is quite a bit more assured in front of the camera, but also one who really insists on showing off in as many scenes as possible, and can demand to get more close-ups than, say, the rather more talented and close-up worthy Newton. There’s also at least one pointless vanity scene showing Cruise rock-climbing early on, which, combined with the antiseptic vibe of the “romance” between him and Newton’s Nyah, makes the first act a bit of a slog.

There’s little interest in team work as a core value of the franchise here anymore, either, so that the thing can turn into even more of the Cruise show.

Scott isn’t great shakes as a villain either, and never feels like the properly oversized threat towards all that is right and good in the world he needs to be to work against Cruise’s plot-armoured Hunt.

To be fair to MIII, there are a quite a few great action sequences in here, but then, great action sequences are only half of what made Woo one of the greatest action directors of all time. The other half is pairing the action with an operatic sense of melodrama, blood with tears. You can see where the film wants to deliver this all-important connection, but with a weak Scott and a Newton that’s never allowed as much space as Cruise, there’s really nobody for the film to connect Cruise with properly, so the melodrama feels hollow and never satisfies emotionally .

Some Thoughts About Der amerikanische Freund (1977) & Ripley’s Game (2002)

Even if you ignore the twenty-five years of change in the technical aspects of filmmaking and the world around it, it does come as a bit of a surprise how different these two adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novel - the older directed by Wim Wenders, the newer by Liliana Cavani – are. Even though both films hew very close to some of the main plot beats, there’s a world of difference in sensibility between them. As a dear friend of mine remarked when I tried to explain the difference between the films, it’s a lot like a piece of classical music realized by (very) different conductors.

The choice of very different lead actors and two very different approaches to the character of Tom Ripley seem to me symptomatic for the difference between the two films: where John Malkovich in the Cavani film hews closer to Highsmith’s text and is a cultured sociopath whose main relation to neurotypical humanity seems to me a curiosity about how people who are very much not like him function internally, Dennis Hopper’s Ripley is a guy in cowboy hat who understands high art probably as well as the Malkovich character does but seems to find actual enjoyment in those things Malkovich-Ripley will probably sniff at as low-brow, and who seems not as precisely drawn as is his 2002 counterpart. There’s a blurriness around Hopper-Ripley’s edges, a wavering between a kind of melancholy that would be alien to Malkovich’s Ripley and the ability for ruthless action they both share. As its Ripley, so are the films: Wenders’s movie feels much more leisurely, much more interested in exploring the inner life of Bruno Ganz’s Jonathan Zimmermann (his version of Dougray Scott’s character in the Cavani film) but also arguing that you can’t understand anyone’s inner life in a precise way. Meandering and circling and walking in a direction that might very well be the wrong one (but one won’t know until one has tried) is more Wenders’s style.


Cavani’s film, on the other hand, seems to me to be all about precision and hard edges, to always know where it is going and why in the clearest manner. Malkovich’s portrayal of Ripley is of a fastidious and neat man who always gives at least the illusion of control, so Cavani’s treatment of the plot needs to and does feel much tighter and leaner than Wenders’s approach. One would be tempted to call her film more conventional, but that does sound rather patronizing to a film that is as strong as this one, and that is as much about finding beauty in the strangest of places, moments and people as it is about its thriller plot. Perhaps the difference is that one of these films was made by a woman who is nearly seventy and has seen and experienced a lot more and the other one by a comparatively young man who still had a lot to catch up on when he made it.