As Charles Foster Kane speeds down the snowy slope of Xanadu on the back of his trusty childhood sled Rosebud, gunfire tears up the mountainside. At the bottom of the incline, Kane sees his adversary, boss Jim Gettys and jumps off the speeding toboggan, does a flip, planting a precision kick to the face of Gettys. He then lands on the ground and with perfect aplomb delivers the catchphrase of the summer: "That's all the news that's fit to print, scumbag."
Luckily for us, great cinema never has and hopefully never will be defined solely by explosions, contusions or body counts.
Sadly, that's just about all Mission: Impossible 2 has going for it.
Tom Cruise stars as Ethan "I'm trying really, really hard to be James Bond" Hunt, an American operative in the apparently still thriving spy world. Hunt is confident, sculpted and basically perfect in every way. (A far cry from the more tortured Ethan Hunt of the first impossible mission. But who needs institutional history, anyway?)
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And while Cruise has rarely looked more at ease in a role, his toothy smiles, designer clothes and wind-blown hair are hardly enough to give his character depth. This is disappointing since the film spends about 45 minutes at the outset trying to make Cruise's character multi-dimensional.
Integral in this attempt is the character of Nyah Nordolf-Hall (played by Thandie Newton). Hall starts out as one clichéd character -- the femme fatale who falls for the hero - but by the end of the movie has transitioned into a completely different cliché -- the damsel in distress. And by the time the movie grinds to a halt, Hall is a mere shadow of a complete character. She literally wanders through the final scenes, seemingly unaware that they're filming a movie around her.
Penned by the once brilliant Robert Towne, the script is full of nothing original and everything hackneyed. Towne once wrote the infallible "Chinatown," but in recent years has taken an artistic turn for the worse, composing such "masterpieces" as "Days of Thunder" and "The Firm."
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