When M.I. went Woo: 'Mission: Impossible 2' turns 25

In the second 'Mission: Impossible' film in 2000, Tom Cruise romanced Thandie Newton and wrestled on the beach.

Here’s what I remembered about Mission: Impossible II which I saw exactly one time in 2000 and never since, before I just rewatched it:

It’s the one John Woo directed, where Tom Cruise has longer hair, there’s not a team, there’s a Limp Bizkit version of the theme son, Anthony Hopkins is his boss and Thandie Newton his love interest, the nondescript actor Dougray Scott is the villain, and at one point Cruise does a move to him that looks a lot like the Rock Bottom.

Mission: Impossible II arrived 25 years ago next week, and four years after the 1996 Mission: Impossible, which was directed by Brian De Palma. The first sequel emerged from a long process in which William Goldman was the original writer, and the screenplay ended up credited to New Hollywood legend Robert Towne.

Woo, then towards the tail end of his Hollywood sojourn, and it was his first film after 1997’s Face/Off. The film offered many of Woo’s bombastic action signatures, including the presence of birds in the middle of an action sequence.

The plot isn’t nearly as twisty or complicated as in the first film, although there are a couple of fantastic deployments of the series’ signature facemask reveals. There’s also not nearly as much globe-trotting as the series typically featured, with the plot mostly set in and around Australia.

In Mission: Impossible II, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, sporting longer hair, is fighting a rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), who’s seeking to start a pandemic and also profit from its antidote. So yes, the film predicted lots of COVID-19 conspiracy theories two decades in advance, although I remember an X-Files conspiracy plot point, not long before this, involving something similar.

The other key character is Nyah (then known as Thandie Newton, who now goes by Thandiwe), a thief romanced by Cruise, and later deployed to take down her former lover, Ambrose, in a plot point borrowed from the Hitchcock film Notorious.

It’s also worth noting that Cruise and Newton have what is probably the steamiest romance Ethan has with any woman over the many years of the series, although her character was never seen again; by the third film, in 2006, Ethan had already gotten together with Michelle Monaghan.

Aside from some help from Ving Rhames’ Luther, there’s also not much of a team aspect, with Ethan alone for most of the scenes that he’s not with Nyah.