26 lines
3.7 KiB
Plaintext
26 lines
3.7 KiB
Plaintext
" well this is not mission : difficult , mr . hunt , it's mission : impossible .
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difficult should be a walk in the park for you . "
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---agent swanbeck ( sir anthony hopkins ) , the series' new agent phelps , takes ethan hunt ( tom cruise ) down a notch .
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a russian scientist ( rade serbedzija ) has created a new virus ( and its antidote ) called chimera that destroys its host within twenty hours of injection .
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a rogue imf agent , sean ambrose ( dougray scott ) , wants to use the disease and cure to blackmail a pharmaceutical company into selling him enough stock to make him owner of the company ( he knows it will soon be worth its weight in gold thanks to the outbreak of the virus he is going to cause ) .
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posing as ethan hunt , ambrose gains the confidence of the scientist long enough to get only the cure , not realizing that the scientist had injected himself with the virus to prevent exactly what ambrose was trying to do .
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the real ethan hunt is called in from his vacation to persuade beautiful thief nyah nordoff-hall ( thandie newton ) to assist the imf team in retrieving the stolen goods .
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ethan and nyah fall quickly in love , but ethan soon finds himself in a real dilemma when he learns that his new love has only been hired because she was a former lover of ambrose's .
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reluctantly , he sets up nyah to be rescued from prison by ambrose so she can infiltrate his compound and send back intelligence to the team .
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ethan must race against time to keep ambrose from obtaining and spreading the virus and prevent any harm from coming to nyah .
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although the first mission : impossible film was a moderate box office success , audiences panned it because they felt the plot was too confusing and there wasn't much action ( although being a fan of the series both old and new , i thought the movie was pretty decent and especially gutsy to make phelps a bad guy ) .
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that problem has been rectified in the sequel by making the plot more accessible ( courtesy of one of the writers of the previous entry , robert towne ) and by turning the film into one gigantic action set piece under the steady hand of action film guru john woo .
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the end result is one of the most entertaining ( yet simple ) action films made in a long while .
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unfortunately , the first forty minutes or so are relatively slow , dwelling mainly on ethan and nyah's quickly blossoming romance and seeming more in place in a james bond film than with the less glamorous mission : impossible tv series .
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ethan's conflict is a compelling one , but it seems very rushed ( and comes about because of a near fatal car wreck that ethan himself causes ! ) .
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john woo handles all of this with an artistic flair that seems out of place , featuring a great deal of slow fades and dramatically framed close-ups .
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the surreal nature of these sequences are distracting and ultimately a detriment to the film .
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thankfully though , at the point ambrose discovers nyah's deception , mission : impossible ii becomes very entertaining and action-packed .
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robert towne's screenplay takes some of the conventions set up in the first film and parodies them during a sequence where ethan must break into a high-rise building and retrieve the remaining specimens of the virus .
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after that , the action scenes just begin to build in intensity , as is the case with many of woo's previous high-octane films .
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the final half hour is an all out assault of action ( a good deal of which is ruined by the trailer , unfortunately ) .
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as far as summer entertainment goes , mission : impossible ii is serviceable fare .
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anyone looking for hardcore action won't be disappointed ( except for during the first half of the film , perhaps ) .
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even if you weren't a fan of the first film , this entry deserves some checking out .
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[pg-13]
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