A film like this rarely lives up to its hype.  First, it’s the sequel to a movie that took in over $180 million domestically and over $420 worldwide in 1996.  Helming the project is arguably the greatest shoot-‘em-up director of all-time, and the screenplay was written by a four-time Oscar nominee.  Its acting lead is one of the world’s biggest stars, who is only a few months removed from his third Oscar nod.  Heck, there’s even an unbilled Oscar winner thrown for good measure.  And then there’s the little matter of every other potential summer blockbuster cutting a wide path around the film’s May 24th release date.

Sadly, M:I-2 doesn’t live up to the hype.  I’m not saying it’s bad (although everybody else in the theatre seemed to think so) – just disappointing.  Believe me, I was pulling for it to set the action film standard for the next four or five years, like M:I-2 director John Woo’s Face/Off did in 1997.  While M:I-2 is better than the last couple James Bond flicks, it struggles to even duplicate the level of entertainment created by the first M:I film.  It’s still entertaining and fun, in a check-your-brain-at-the-box-office kind of way.

Tom Cruise (Magnolia) returns as Ethan Hunt, IMF (Impossible Missions Force) pointman, who, as the film opens, has his rock-climbing vacation interrupted by an emergency summons to Seville, Spain, where the IMF boss (played by an uncredited Anthony Hopkins, Titus) dispatches him to apprehend a malevolent Scotsman (shades of Fat Bastard?) that has designs on threatening the world with a deadly virus called Chimera.

To complete his mission, Hunt nabs M:I’s only other holdover in Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, Bringing out the Dead), as well as a wisecracking agent played by Aussie actor John Polson (The Boys).  Hunt is also instructed to recruit the services of a civilian master thief named Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton, Besieged), who also happens to be an ex-lover of Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott, Ever After), the IMF's target.  Hunt and Nyah become soulmates after about thirty seconds of contact, at which point M:I-2 becomes slightly derailed by a lot of unnecessary, vomit-inducing romance, including a really corny line that I think may have been stolen from Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans.

Like the original M:I film, the sequel is full of double-crossing via rubber masks, which look a lot cooler here than they did four years ago, thanks to advancements in CGI.  There are also some nifty gadgets, such as a satellite that can capture detailed video of anyone in the world.  And like Face/Off (or any Woo film), there’s plenty of double-fisted gunplay, birds taking flight, martial arts, slow-motion action, and a chase scene that goes on for a bit too long (it was boats in Face/Off and it's motorcycles here).  That is to say, there’s plenty of this stuff in the last fifteen minutes.  The rest of the film is pretty light on all of the exciting things that you would expect from Woo.  In fact, Woo fans will probably be bitterly disappointed, but then again, they have slightly unreal expectations because of the director’s previous work.

M:I-2 has a plot so convoluted that they have the bad guy narrate what’s happening during one sequence, and it will still leave you scratching your head (people complained that the first film was too hard to follow, which is probably why they tried to add the explanation here).  Hey, this isn’t Chinatown (which screenwriter Robert Towne also penned) - it’s an action flick, implying that there should be action throughout the film, and not just the last fifteen minutes.

Another big problem is with Scott, who overacts so badly that I thought he was doing a bad Scottish accent (turns out he’s actually from Scotland).  He’s certainly not physically intimidating, and he damn well isn’t creepy enough to pull off a “psychological madman”-type role, like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, or even Robert Carlyle in The World is Not Enough.  Is he evil?  Maybe.  Is he diabolical?  Definitely not.  Ambrose doesn’t come off any more threatening than anybody else with a sneer and an accent.

Cruise is simply adequate and, apparently, too short to don the flowing black trenchcoat usually worn by the lead actors in Woo’s films (see Nic Cage in Face/Off or Chow Yun-Fat in anything).  While M:I-2 has added the romantic angle, Cruise’s character has become a little more human, but there still isn’t much to like about Ethan Hunt, other than hearing Rhames call him “Efan” instead of “Ethan.”  In short (sorry, Tom), M:I-2 is ridiculously unbelievable, which is something that every entertaining action flick should be.  But it should have been so much better.

2:08 – for violence, sexual content and adult language