Mission inevitable

Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton sizzle in MI2

by Gary Susman

Here's a theory: the best TV-series-to-film adaptations work because they barely try to replicate the series at all but just use it as a jumping-off point. Consider, for a few painful moments, The Avengers, Lost in Space, the Flintstones movies, and virtually every film version of a Saturday Night Live sketch, all fiascos, and all little more than TV episodes stretched to feature length. Now, consider The Untouchables, The Brady Bunch Movie, the Addams Family movies, The Fugitive -- all successful reimaginings of the series that spawned them, and all likely to induce coronaries in purist fans. Note that even a lame or mediocre series can make a good movie as long as the filmmakers don't treat the show as gospel.

Add to this list the movie version of Mission: Impossible. All it kept from the 1960s series was the notion of a team of spies, the gimmickry (gadgets, disguises, the self-destructing mission instructions), the indispensable theme music by Lalo Schifrin, and the character Jim Phelps, whose transformation into a villain horrified the show's cult of fans. But it did have Tom Cruise as a young and vigorous hero, a consistently surprising plot, and, thanks to director Brian De Palma (who turned the stolid Untouchables into an intense action epic), a headlong pace with some memorable, hard-to-top action sequences. The movie was a poor homage, but it worked well on its own summer-blockbuster terms.

Now, with Mission: Impossible 2, producer/star Cruise and his handpicked filmmaking team are freed from having to remind viewers of anything but the 1996 movie. (The sharp-eyed viewer will, however, catch a lot of apparent references to various Cruise movies, from Risky Business to Rain Man to Eyes Wide Shut.) Action guru John Woo is at the helm this time, with a screenplay by venerated scribe and frequent Cruise collaborator Robert Towne. On paper, it sounds like a can't-miss proposition, and despite some bad-karma production rumors (hurricane delays, cost overruns, ego clashes, last-minute re-edits), everything has fallen into place for an action megathriller that should please everyone except those still smarting over the Jim Phelps betrayal.

Fans of Woo's films, from Hong Kong classics like Hard-Boiled to Hollywood action operas like Face/Off, should prepare their checklists. Doubles, masks, and doppelgängers: check. Black trenchcoats: check. Fights and gunplay that look like ballet (and dancing that looks like fighting): check. (Viewers who see similarities to The Matrix should remember that the Wachowskis were borrowing from Woo.) Doves: check. An evenly matched hero and villain who respect and thoroughly understand each other: check. Heartstopping action sequences that you'll be replaying in your head for days and months afterward: check.

The film pits Cruise's Ethan Hunt against a renegade colleague, Sean Ambrose (a truly vicious Dougray Scott) -- each is leading a team in search of a manmade super-flu virus as well as its vaccine. Ethan's hunters include MI1 computer guy Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, along for the ride just because he's so damn cool) and civilian thief Nyah Hall (Thandie Newton, of Beloved, who, if there's any justice, will become a huge star thanks to her work here). After some foreplay in the form of a hair-raising car chase, Ethan beds Nyah, falls in love with her, and sends her off to betray old boyfriend Sean. (Ambrose's very modern plan: to ransom the virus back to the biotech firm that created it, in return for stock options.)

Bioterrorism aside, the real chemistry here is between Cruise and Newton. MI2 may be a testosterone movie whose characters have little use for (and a low opinion of) women, but Newton's charisma raises the emotional stakes. In turn, she inspires Cruise to a newfound maturity, both in his self-assured, relaxed, sex appeal (when Ethan is pursuing Nyah) and in his bitter, regretful, moral awareness (as Ethan considers the human cost of his putting Nyah in harm's way). Who'd have guessed, but MI2 is one of the few movies where Cruise manages to shed his cocky frat-boy persona and act like a man.