TAKE ONE Presents... - The Impossipod 2: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 (2000)

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Simon and Jim discuss John Woo's hi-octane early-2000s take on the Mission: Impossible franchise, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2. They discuss the many issues with this film's script, the John Wooiness of it all, the strong current of misogyny running through the entire film and how Thandiwe Newton is literally the only woman that speaks in it, how we're starting to see the early seeds of Tom Cruise's controversial on-set and off-set behaviour including his insistence on performing his own stunts, and the very strange top ten grossing films at the worldwide box office in the year 2000.Content warnings: airplane travel and disaster; misogyny and sexual coercion; statutory rape; violent death including murder and suicide; chemical and biological weapons; viruses and pandemic; cult leadership.Our theme song is Star - X - Impossible Mission (Mission Impossible Theme PsyTrance Remix) by EDM Non-Stop (https://soundcloud.com/edm-non-stop/star-x-impossible-mission) licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.Full references for this episode available in Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/PJLRKSI9

Your mission should you choose to accept it is to obtain photographic proof, theft, shadow glitzen to his buyer, and apprehend with both. As always, should you or any member of your ion force be caught or kill Secretary of Missabal? Hello and welcome to Ticron Presents the Impossopod. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to listen to us what all the Mission Impossible franchise films in order, contextualizing them and critiquing them. I'm Simon Burry, and joining my IMF team is, as always, Jim Ross. Hi, Jim. Hello.

How are you? Good, good. I think it goes really a bit better after watching the first one of these films in the second, but we'll get into that. Yeah, because today we are discussing Mission Impossible 2 from the year 2000, the first sequel to Mission Impossible, the first thing that sets this up as a franchise, and really gets this franchise going in, well, a completely new direction, almost a 180 from where they started in a way that will be

that the franchise will course correct over the course of the franchise. Very short-lived new direction as it turns out. Yes. I usually start by asking when did you first see this.

I don't remember when I first saw this. So do you? I can't remember for certain. It has the it's smack bang in that period where I think it was probably on VHS or DVD from Blockbuster around about when it came out what I do know is I would have been too young to get well you know technically I mean I'm sure you probably I probably could have got in but I was definitely too young for the certificate at HUD in the UK for the cinema release so I'd be

very surprised if I saw it in the cinema so I suspect that's probably how I saw it as a Blockbuster rental. Yeah, I suspect I'm probably the same, maybe catching out of TV at some point when I was a teenager or whatever. But certainly no strong memories of going to the cinema or seeing it in a particular way

or any strong memories of it at all until I re-watched it a couple of years ago and then re-watched it for this episode. I have very strong memories of it. I think, yeah, we'll get into it. We'll get into why, because there's a lot of things that I remember very, very clearly about this film and the other things, which, before re-watching it, I really did not. So, yeah. We will.

We'll get into it. But, yes, following Mission Impossible's success, Tom Cruise's production company, Cruz Wagner, wanted a new Mission Impossible to follow it, a new sequel. so they set about production pretty soon after Mission Impossible One to get this going. William Goldman, the writer of the Princess Bride novel, was apparently the first screenwriter on the film, but didn't contribute a great deal to it. It was then taken up by Ronald D. Moore and Brann & Braga, who both got their start on Star Trek, of the next generation. Ronald D. Moore in particular

were a lot of the Clingon episodes spanning out expanding the idea of the Clingon Empire. And then went on to do like Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, and recently for All Mankind

and Apple TV Plus, which is great, recommended. And then to sort of finish it off and turn it into a script, Robert Town, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Robert Town,

Probably who I've bought you out in, like, 75, 25 years before this film was made. Yeah, not for Mission Impossible 2. I don't think he was even nominated for Mission Impossible 2. I wonder why. But Robert Town was kind of a stalwart of New Hollywood, and was a screenwriter around the New Hollywood era. He did uncredited touch-ups on The Godfather back in the day, and won the Academy Award, like you said, in 1974, for Chinatown.

Roman Polanski's Chinatown Statutory Rapist Roman Polansky's Chinatown And it's like The First Mission Impossible I think And like a lot of franchise films made today This was built around the action sequences They came up with the action sequences first And then wrote the script around them

So they have I think I read some where they had The Free Climing bit at the start the car chase with Ethan Hunt and Nya the heist scene and then the motorcycle ballet at the end or whatever as as the core scenes and built the idea built the script around them which is how these things are done these days

so yeah it's directed by John Wu they eventually brought in John Wu as the director who you may know from a lot of, what, Hong Kong action films? Yeah, so I think the main things that he's probably known, I mean, hard-boiled is always the one that I, also the one I think of with John Woo, but I think you've also got things like bullet in the head, killer, and then he, this wasn't his first kind of like Hollywood effort.

There was a couple of, there's a few films before this, which I actually quite liked at the time that were kind of like DVD staple favourites but he's the director of face off well yeah let's talk about face off yeah the much Ballyhooed Nichols Cage John Travolta Switcheroo film

in the first five minutes of face off in the first five minutes a helicopter lands on a plane a moving plane it's great it's a great film so yeah I've got a lot of time for face off and then I think less less well regarded, but

I had a lot of fun with Broken Arrow, which was a John Travolta, Christian Slater thing from the year before. You know, and you can see some of that sort of like this, you know, amp-top kind of, you know, ridiculous sort of operatic sort of behavior there in those. So I think those were the

Hollywood things, and there was also a hard target, which I've not seen. But I think if you say John Wu, to me, I think most people would probably think of hard-boiled, I think. Sure. I haven't seen it. I think a face off. And there is a lot of, there is a lot of John Wu in Mission Impossible too. There's a lot of slow-mo. There's a lot of blatant use of doves as kind of obvious symbolism. And there's a lot of kind of balletic action. I mentioned the motorcycle ballet towards the end. That will get to. But yes, John Wu was brought on us, director. And ultimately the film comes out in the year 2000. I believe it had its premiere in May,

yeah, May 24th, 2000 in the United States. So in the year 2000, the top box office films are number one, Mission Impossible 2. Topping out the box office, we're at the top, the peak now. Gladiator is number two, Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Castaway is number three. Which is... Wilson!

Interesting. Exactly. Kind of Robert Zemeckis drama is not traditional blockbush. I have no idea cast. We made that much money, to be perfectly honest. No, I wouldn't have thought so either.

It's a solid, solid in a film, but it's not, you know, blockbuster cinema, like I say. What Women Want at... Oh, Jesus Christ. Number four. That is a... that is the

source of an absolutely terrible date for 13 year old gym actually I went to a cinema to see that with a girl from school and that film was dog shit man I hated that there's no sugar-coating it

I really did not like that film terrible well we're talking about ill-fated dates to Mel Gibson films I took a date to see the passion of the Christ. Good Lord.

Which is... Some light material for a verse to eight there. Was a bad idea. Oh, good Lord. But yes, what women want is at number four, and we'll get into the gender politics around the early 2000. I don't know if that made this much money after.

What's going on in the year 2000? This is ridiculous. What women want, the fourth highest-grossing movie of the year? Jesus. That's crazy. Dinosaur is at number five Which is, I guess, a kind of live action Slash animated Disney film about a dinosaur

I have to be honest, this is what... Dinosaur, I am aware of the existence of Dinosaur is one of these films where, like, I just have no, no memory of this film ever existing, basically, at all. Yeah, no nothing about it. Some films that just don't exist. At all. Yeah.

But number five. Number six, how the Grinch stole Christmas That's the Jim Carrey version Meet the Parents at number seven The Perfect Storm at number eight X-Men at number nine Now that surprises me I would have put that a lot higher

If you'd ask me what was high in the box office In 2000 But X men at number nine And then what lies beneath at number 10 So two Robert Zemeckises in the top ten But it's It's a bit of a mixed bag, you know, it's a lot of traditional blockbusters and a lot of, and some unconventional, I think, top-grossing films. What Lies Belief? What Women Want? Cast Away. Maybe even meet the parents. I don't know if a comedy would get that high these days.

I don't think so. I mean, certainly the sequels to meet the burdens of not. yeah it's an interesting top box office that because if you go kind of like just one year before I think it looks a lot more sort of like what we'd expect now you've got Star Wars episode one at the top you've got Toy Story 2 kicking around there

and if you even go one year after this you kind of start to get properly into franchise film making the top film the year after is Harry Potter and it says the sorcerer's stone on the world by box office of course it's probably the philosopher's stone to anybody listen from Britain and then the year after that it's like you know it's another

Harry Potter film it's the Lord of Rings suit you know so it's almost like the year 2000 a little bit of an anomaly actually and some of the stuff that's kind of made it that high up in particular I'm thinking of a castaway there and what women want and you know that sort of thing yeah it feels like a transitional period so I

did a lot of thinking about the 2000s you know going into this to kind of contextualize the film and I I think it was a transitional period. I'll get into politics later on, but in terms of politics, America is shifting from the Clinton administration to the election of George W. Bush at the end of the year. So I think there's some political stuff going on,

some kind of nascent political undercurrents that inform this film and inform the box office generally, it would seem. I think something that will probably come up as we go into the film it's probably notable that there's not a lot of them because this is a very long-running series after this point but it's also the last of the films which is pre-9-11

right? Yes. And you get that feeling kind of like some of the plot points which we'll talk about who exactly the enemies are even down to actually air travel in this again because the whole thing opens with a segment on a plane

It still has that very... It's an interesting one. It really is properly a time capsule, right? Because I would argue that the first mission impossible, when we discussed this at the time, it kind of reflects, you know, Cold War, immediately post-Cold War kind of paranoia type stuff. And it feels, in a way,

it actually feels like a film that is older than its mid-90s release date. This one is squarely in the time period that was released. This feels like a year 2000. film. You know, if you ask me for an archetypal year 2000 film, Mission Impossible 2 is the one that I'm going to come to from tone, plot, even the music, frankly, and we'll come to the music as well, and it's many different guises later on. But yeah, let's get cracking going through the film, because one of my first notes is about the time capsule nature of

the music in particular. The film starts with a... a pan over Sydney Opera House. One of many shots of Sydney Opera House, we will get in the film to position the film in and around Sydney, Australia. Even though no one ever enters the Sydney Opera House and it's not important to the plot, we'll get a lot of shots of it,

just so we know it's in Sydney. This film's saying Sydney. You know this is on Australia. But we pan over the Sydney Opera House and we go into a lab in biosite pharmaceuticals. A scientist injects himself with something while a strange voiceover takes place and then there's a brief shot of some children playing ominously in the most cliche way possible. They're literally singing wringer-ringer roses and dancing in kind of grey scale slow motion

while the scientist reflects on the sins of biotechnology. The scientist fella ends up on a plane next to a long-haired Tom Cruise. they're disgusting the virus or whatever the oxygen masks drop on the plane but they're full of sleeping gas and Cruz ends up killing the scientist and stealing the satchel which contains the virus

but then a rubber mask is ripped off and it's not Cruz it's just some dude the baddies escape the plane and it crashes into a mountain should we start a running mask count at this point yeah why why not yeah because I feel like this is real

of all the mission possible films this one really feels like masquerama it really is like you know yes it's something of an inversion of the first film where it started with this this old interrogator ripping off the mask and it's tom cruise in this one it's someone who looks like tom cruise ripping off the mask to reveal someone else there's some shots here of ephan hunt free climbing the mountain so this is a kind of first indication of the Tom Cruisey stunts that this film will late that this franchise will later be defined by because Tom Cruise insisted on doing this free climbing bit himself there's another bit later on where he insisted that an actual knife was used during the last fight scene where the knife comes paralitally close to his eye

yeah but we'll talk about that more when we get to it because that's actual a teen-person behavior. Yeah, we'll talk to that. That way we'll come for it. But there was no safety net when he filmed this free climbing sequence. He did a harness and a thin wire. But this is the very

kind of embryonic stage of Tom Cruise demanding, they'll do his own stunts and getting more power over that decision as the franchise goes on. Now these films are known for. Tom Cruise does his own stunts. He does these deftifying things. I personally think it's

horribly irresponsible of him to do this. He is a producer on the film. He knows more than anyone else how many people will be impacted. How many people will lose their jobs if something goes wrong, if he, you know, heaven forbid, dies, doing one of these stunts. So I think he too responsible. I don't enjoy it the way a lot of film critics seem to admire him for saving cinema. I'm not a fan.

No, we will discuss this more when we get to, in particular, I've got to get the one right here, particularly where we get deeper into the seas and we talk about dead reckoning, right? Yeah, he'll talk about this a lot more. Yeah, I think there's a lot of kind of like treating Cruz as a sort of

I would say national treasure but he's not, you know, he's not British, but kind of like this is like treasure of cinema. But he's kind of an American national treasure, you know, when the Olympics went to L.A., he took the, yeah, yeah, he took the torch. Like, you know, it was symbolically him taking it to Hollywood

more specifically but America generally and yeah I think I'm with you and I'm not as falling over cruises a lot and I don't

I'm not trying to cancel Tom Cruise or something like you know let's not get into that but it's just he's not this you know benevolent savior of Siddaba he's done a lot of questionable

things and I think sort of the I find the attitude to him curious shall we say and I think we'll probably talk about that more in the next episode right because there's a six year gap between this film and the next film for various different reasons including the reception of this film I think

over time but we'll get into that more in the next one I don't think it's quite relevant to the films just yet but you're quite right and this is kind of this is the first hint of it right it's something to look out for so I'm just flagging it here and I don't like that

he does his own sense but he's doing it here this also feels immediately like a different Ethan Hunt to the espionage Ethan Hunt of the last film we're introduced to long-haired frill seeker Ethan

a helicopter shoots a rocket at him and the rocket contains sunglasses they have a video in them where Anthony Hopkins tells him he needs to put a team together and it must include Tandy Wayne Newton title sequence limp biscuit rocking out to the

their rendition of the Mission Impossible theme. Early 2000's new metal, early 2000s excess, high octane. This really feels like a time capsule. This specific focus on new metal and the kind of

high octane edginess of the whole affair really dates this in the 2000s. Yeah, and it comes with mixed feelings for me because I would love to sit here and take a sort of like musical model

high ground and say God, Limp Biscuit they're fucking awful I'd never buy a Limp Biscuit album I'll just leave it there I'll just say I cannot say that but for better or worse I actually think that

the theme music here is really good I think it actually kind of works with that style of music really quite well yeah I do not think works but I'm sure it worked better at the time no I'm doubling down Simon it works well in 2025 as well I'm calling it but at the time you know young young Simon was wearing his baggy jeans with his wallet chain and going to Affleck's Palace in Manchester and listening to Limbiscuit LinkedIn Lincoln Park LinkedIn Park

and papa roach you know oh god yeah paparroach we've got a big paparote yeah these were the days dipping his toes

into slip knot but that was a bit too bit too bit too edger yeah but all this is is all this is suffused in the DNA

of this film so Ethan Hunt travels to Seville in Spain and he meets Tandyway Newton at a flamenco dance

Tandyway Newton plays a thief a kind of professional fief called Naya she is also the only woman in the film and I for people who aren't watching along for people who don't watch the films along with us

I am not exaggerating and I say she is the only woman in the film I went on IMDB and went down the cast list and the only other women are flamenco dancers numbers one through seven who do not speak there is one speaking role for a woman

and it's Tandyway Newton Is it possible get a negative score on the Bechdale test? Is that possible? And we'll get into how the film treats that one woman later on but it is shocking Yeah I think it's probably unclear Are there no other women in the film

because they didn't write any women in the film or they were all treated as abysmally as the lead to women that nobody wanted to be in it. Yeah. So he meets Tandyway Newton at a flamenco dance. And this scene plus his longer hair is the first indication of how they're trying to make Ethan Hunt sexy in this film. This film is immediately a lot more gratuitously sexy. I'm saying sexy because that's what they're going for. I don't think this is sexy.

But they seem to have been, crews in particular seems to have been really taken by a variety review of Mission Impossible, which referred to it as sexless, and they've gone in the opposite direction and made him as sexy as possible. So in this scene, she's trying to steal something from the villa, and within minutes, she and Ethan are in a compromising position in a bathtub. You know, there's jokes about her being on top. there's a very pawny synth track on the soundtrack and every shot of her is very male gazing her legs and her breasts unnecessarily yeah and they're like you know so they're in the bathtub he's lying down she's kind of like straddling him basically and it's just it's just so and listen i'm not you know i mean because i think we need to pause here to like say I, I don't think either of us are of that school thought about, and obviously this is not a sex scene, right? There will be a sex scene, spoiler earlier, but I'm not of the school thought we're kind of like, you know, sex scenes are needless and da-da-da-da, right?

Because there is quite a strong, you know, element of that kicking around these days, which kind of mystifies me, right? So I'm not, I'm not, I don't have a problem with portraying sexuality, sexual tension, and sexual chemistry in films. That's not what this is. it's leery, right? There's an over-the-shoulder shot, right? Because they're doing the kind of like classic, you know, the 180 flip for the conversation. But when it cuts to focusing on crews, right,

it's an over-shoulder shot from behind Tandy Wayne Newton. And it includes out-of-focus, very obviously, her cleavage for no real reason, really. I mean, it's just, and combined with the stuff that you said, it's the first hint that there's this just terrible straight, misogyny through the whole thing and it's just yeah that is honestly the part

of the film which is amongst many elements dated maybe the worst but certainly amongst the most poorly yeah I'll get into more about the treatment of Newton's character later on but suffice to say they are attempting to make Tom Cruise sexy and failing

so they leave the mansion and hunt pursues Naya in a using their early 2000 mobile phones to communicate. And there's a car chase where they're on the edge of a mountain pass and they're driving very fast to try and catch up within it. The scene looks identical to the equivalent scene in Golden Eye, where James Bond pursues a woman in a fast car in the first few minutes. Apart from John Wu's distracting slow-mo cinematography.

And generally, there is a lot of, it feels like a lot of Golden Eye in this film. film. To the extent that I eventually just wrote in my notes, did John Wu want to make a James Bond and not get the chance? But I looked it up and John Wu turned down Golden Eye. He was the first director they approached for Golden Eye and turned it down. I couldn't find out why, but then it's very interesting that five years later, this film which in many ways has elements that are carbon copies of Golden Eye comes out. Ethan Hunt and Naya sleep together. He hasn't even been given his mission yet, and he's already compromised his team. And then he goes to see Mission Commander Anthony Hopkins. So Anthony Hopkins, who is a British man, leading the United States IMF, not impossible, but it does make it feel all the more as if Wu just wanted to make a Bond film, because he's very M in this scene.

I'd also say up to this point, right, it feels like this is going to be a very long film. Right. Because I just have to say, he hasn't been given his mission yet until this scene. But it's just like, there's also, the something about that car chase, and it's just, it's just, it makes these, like, we may be dealing with an international super spy here and a, and the, accomplished professional thief and it just makes there's no rhyme or reason to what they're

doing in that car chase and they're just about kill each other for like you know like what they do is this vehicular flirtation like what are they doing here it makes the pair of them look like fucking idiots frankly

right you know it just like and it's interesting right the scene you're about to get into I find it an interesting one because everything up to this point I really think has been really pretty dreadful, frankly, right? There's also, like, an exchange with their witty banter where she says something and, like, you know, awfully short notice about being kissed and he says, care to wait a decent interval?

Who wants to be decent? And it's like, who wrote this? As you pointed out, Academy Award winning school at Robert Time. But, like, it's just dreadful. These two idiots who don't talk like that, you know, and they talk. to each other, like, they're, like, characters in a street to DVD, like, late 90s rom-com. And, like, at this point, I was just like, oh, good God, because I've been thinking about trying to re-watch this for several years, and this is the point where I've actually

come around to doing it, and it's at this point in the film, or that was hell, this was a mistake. This was a mistake. Cancel the Pod series. We're not doing it. I can't do any more of it, rather than watch the remaining hour and a half of this film. I can't. not do it. But yeah. You've dragged yourself to do it and dragged me along with you. Yeah. Yeah. It's right you'd already rewatched it recently as well. Yeah. But I just want to mention it because like there are there are points in this film after it where I think it's great, parts where I think it's terrible and you know, it's a proper mix and we'll get into it. I do feel like with this scene that you're talking about with Anthony Hawkins, there is a step change I feel

in how they are approaching the film and also kind of like the depiction of Ethan Hunt, right? So I just find that interesting because up to this point it's a very rocky start I have to say. Yeah, I say it feels very James Bond because Anthony Hopkins plays the character as the exasperated mission commander.

You know, this isn't a professional asking another professional to put a team together for a job like John Voigt was asked in the last film. This is exasperated Anthony Hopkins, like, oh, I have to rely on you, this, you know, this Austin Powers character, essentially, this hard-shagging, hard-playing, hard-climing, wasteal, who happens to be the best that they have.

I'll put that on the poster. It's impossible to, hard-fighting, hard-spine, hard-shagging. But Anthony Hopkins briefs him on the chimera, virus, which is a virus that Biosite Pharmaceuticals has made, and he needs to get it back and to do that, they need to go to capture a rogue IMF agent. In Ethan Hump's absence, Hopkins has been using an Ethan Hunt look-alike who is called Sean Ambrose. He's played by Doug Ray Scott. And at the end of this briefing, Hopkins utters the immortal line, this is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt. This is mission impossible.

You resist the urge to turn off the film and you carry on. It's just ridiculous. I mean, it just sounds like an awesome power slide. It's just, oh, God. Academy Award winning screenwriter Robert Tang. One of the screenwriters of the godfather, Robert Tan. Sean Ambrose is played by Doug Ray Scott. Doug Gray Scott was almost a movie star.

So he was cast as Wolverine, but couldn't play him because the filming of this went over, went over schedule. So they had to go with Hugh Jackman instead. He was almost James Bond, but in the end it went to Daniel Craig. Doug Ray Scott has always been so close. Was so close for a period there of being a genuine movie star. But he's a supporter of Scottish independence, so he's a goody in mind. my book and it would have been wild to have a James Bond who was in favour of the dissolution of the British Union yeah I think also I haven't seen the I haven't seen the show that

you won it for him but I believe he has won an Emmy uh since um oh sure and he's a good actor I must admit this is and we'll get into kind of like some of his lines and you know deliveries and stuff here because this is the point where you start to kind of like get a bit more about the Sean Ambrose character right um there's a few things I appreciate you but I really like his performance and amongst the kind of like all the various other things in the film I do like his performance I do also, I don't know

there's just something I quite like about kind of like a Scottish actor being able to perform this role with his actual accent and not having to like do a full British accent or American accent or something and I really do think it actually adds quite some quite a bit to some of his line deliveries later on so I do I actually think he's he's pretty

good here he's one of my sort of like you know, one of the parts of the film that I appreciate you, I think. He is pretty good. It's interesting that he is a rogue IMF agent, so he's kind of a dark mirror of Ethan Hunt. But again, this is the role that Sean Bean played in Golden Eye. He's an MI6 agent gone rogue. He was 006, I think.

And he was even played by Sean Bean. So there's a similarity in the character's name to Sean Bean's role in Golden Eye. very strange it really feels like john woo just regretted not taking golden eye and decided to just make it i mean i hate to say it i do like so john woo's other other films but on the basis of what i'm seen here at the golden eye ended up a better film as a result frankly yeah yeah anyway no doubt uh so even hunt tells newton about the mission uh tells tandyway newton about the mission she was the girlfriend of sean ambrose uh and so they decide to make it look like naya

is in trouble so that Sean takes her in and she can be a mole in his organization. They injects her with a transponder to track her and then there's a lot of shots of a satellite. Like whenever Hunt says the word satellite, a satellite will track you and there's a CG shot of a satellite and I was wondering if Wu is afraid of us not knowing how GPS works and then I wondered, you know, to what extent was GPS commercially available to the civilian masses in the early 2000s. I'm not sure people would have known about GPS. Oh, it would have been an exotic new technology.

Obviously, GPS has been around since the 70s, but in kind of military applications. People didn't have GPSes in their phones. So maybe that's just an element that has aged badly, but made sense at the time. Hunt recruits someone called Billy Baird and his old friend Lufor, played by Vic Graham. Billy Baird is basically Simon Pegg's role from the later films but without the personality

and Lufa's job is to sit at a computer and tell Hunt to hurry up. They're meeting the Australian Outback while Naya goes to meet Sean Ambrose. Sean Ambrose represents a kind of different form of male sexuality to hunt. He's quietly threatening, but in a sexy way. And this will be Naya's role to be torn between these two men. that is Tandyway Newton's role in the film she is very much just an object of sexual desire caught between these two men

it really does feel like a stark contrast to Claire and Max in Mission Impossible who had their own personalities and weren't defined solely by their attraction to to Ethan Hunt it just feels like a kind of early 2000 strain of casual misogyny that is throughout the film and is represented through this one woman. So there is an article I found by Ilaria Boncari called Mission Impossible, a reading of the

after-death of the heroin in Culture and Organisation Journal, which talks about Nya briefly as a kind of sexualized heroin. So she talks about how over the years the female characters in the Mission Impossible franchise have changed and embodied more important roles, suggesting a positive development towards the understanding of women's changing professional positions. So while the Bond movies, she says, have stagnated, the Mission Impossible movie series slowly adapts to changing cultural norms in Western society.

Here, however, this is like the starting point, where they're starting and not changing. Most of the article is a discussion of Ilsa Faust, who is a character will get to in the later, to Miss Impossible films, but for now, this is just fully operating in a kind of misogynist patriarchal system

where Naya is just an object of sexual desire, and it's not even relevant later on that she is a professional thief. Like, now that they've met, she will never be referred to as a thief again, and it's not important that she's a thief,

she will do no feeding. Yeah, right, it's the way they introduce the character, but basically essentially from this point on and it amps it up later. She is essentially just your archetypal damsel and distress type thing, right? Exactly. And that positioning of her is an object of sexual desire. I think what's quite interesting about it is she's positioned that way from the start when she's still being presented as a thief, right? We discussed that scene where they're, you know, the flamenco dancing party, right? But from this point on, not only is she presented that way by the film, right?

But also within the story, and it's very overt about it. Like, it's not even that sort of, like, if you go back to the xenopod, right, we were talking about kind of like Alien versus Predator and the way that it was actually quite a conservative and nasty film and like its treatment of unhoused people and things like that. But I think what we put that down to was it was a regression to the mean regression to the status quo and sort of an absence of thought. Yes. Here, I'm not actually sure that's really the case. Just to interrupt you briefly, we said the same thing about Jurassic World as well. Yes. In the Dinopod, it's a lazy regression to the mean in the depiction of Claire that comes off as, and is, misogynistic.

Yeah, right? So we've covered this sort of thing before, but like here, in this specific film, at least, it feels a lot more sort of active in its side. Her role in the film is to be sexual bait. I mean, that is what it is, right? You know, they put her there to basically exploit Sean Ambrose's libido, basically. And on top of that, not only is that what is done

by the good guys in this film, that's their plan, the good guys, right? Let's essentially take this woman and, you know, hold her criminal record over her in order to prostitute her out, right? Because that's basically what they're doing here, right? Not only that, the bad guy in the film, as covered by the scene, we'll probably get to shortly, knows that's what they're doing and embraces that, right? So she really is, she was presented as a sexual object by the film, kind of like to the viewer, she's presented as a sexual object by the good guys in the film and she's received as a sexual object by the bad guy in the film. It was at this point where I'm just like, this is that, and then there's one scene, there's a scene shortly after this, which we may be able to get to that kind of nailed it hold for you, but at this point I'm just kind of sitting going, this is pretty gross actually as like a plot, you know, as a series of plots. This is really like, I'm actually not okay with this. Like this is, you know, because it doesn't feel like it's a, it doesn't feel like it has that self-reflective quality.

There is one moment later in the film where I feel like it tries to question this but up to this point it's just kind of like that's just what we're doing this is necessary and it feels a bit gross up to this point to be perfectly honest Yeah it's it's explicitly misogynistic

in the text as well so Anthony Hopkins has a line where they're coming up with the plan and he says you know is she prepared for this and Anthony Hopkins says, go to bed with a man and lie to him. She's a woman.

She's got all the training she needs. Har, har, har, har, har, har, har. Yeah. It's just gross, kind of, you know, slut-shaming a woman for getting into bed with a man who she's been told to do this with as part of a mission. It's just, it's gross. And the way the film treats her,

just as this object of sexuality, and nothing else is... Yeah, in particular, the Hoboken's line. It's very early odd in the film, right? So the other part of this is, I think it would be a fairly gross way to treat this character anyway, but nothing has been established to this effect.

You know, she's not been a study, beyond kind of like the characterisation as a thief. Like, she's not been, you know, she's not been characterised as a, you know, deceitful, promiscuous person, right? there is nothing near to this effect. Basically, her establishing characteristics

at this point are, she's a thief and she's a woman. That's it. Yeah, the assumption is that she's a woman, therefore she is a deceitful slut. It's gross. So it just seems to be a kind of early 2000s kind of, quote, edgy, casual misogyny that just feels part of the time.

You know, part of this conservative, pushback, I think, that led to George Sibuya Bush's election in America. And it's gross. Tandyway Newton, for her part, did not have a good time making this film. So she discussed unpleasant onset experiences with Cruz during the shooting of the film and their scenes together. So Cruz was very stressed with the expectations of the sequel. He wanted it to be good. and he seemed to take this stress out on Newton

there was a particular incident where they decided to role play one another and it was really unhelpful for her and he just didn't seem to recognise this and went on regardless I think we get a kind of first hint of crew's unpleasantness behind the scenes

intimidating Newton with his own insecurity in a kind of gross way but yes all this is to say that naya is going in to have sex with ambrose and infiltrate his organization so hunt explains to his new team how this scientist made the chimera virus so he could create the antivirus ballerophon they're they're kind of a diad that reflects the kind of Ethan hunt Sean ambrose diad there's a lot of diads in this film and they explain these Greek myth references out loud to the audience. Ambrose, yeah, as you just said, threatens his right-hand man and says that he doesn't trust Naya, but he's keeping her around for sex.

Gross. At Hunt and Naya reconvene at Racetrack. They share intel on the organisation. Ambrose is meeting Brendan Gleason, who they identify as John McCloy, the CEO of Biosite, and the intercept footage showing the chimera virus destroying someone. At Biosite, Gleason gets kidnapped and he gets gassed in his limo, he wakes up in a lab where he sees the dead scientist fellow telling him he's been injected with chimera and Hunt manipulates him to get some kind of confession with him, question mark. I'll confess, I didn't understand what they were doing here.

Is it to find the location of the chimera virus? I think so. But it's in Biosite headquarters. Which would have been a fair guess. Yeah. So I wasn't sure what was happening. So to get the chimera virus, the gang need to break into Biosite to get the virus, and they plan a heist in the building. While Ambrose predicts what Hunt will do and plans a counterheist.

This heist is lacking the kind of centrality in the film and De Palma's focus on physical location from the first film. and the kind of spycraft of it all but for my money it's still the best sequence in the film even if it's nowhere near as good as the first so you know the first film had the kind of security room that they had to steal into the big obstacle in this one is they're going in from the roof

and there were these vents that they need to position so that hunt can skydive bunge it into them, into the vents as they open, make his way in, release the winch, and then sneak into the Biosite Lab. That's about all there is to it. But it's still a, Keller is still a kind of fun, fun heisty thing. So Hunt does that. He eventually reaches the lab and destroys the various chimera samples. He's about to destroy the last injection gun when Ambrose's team of heavies intercepts him and there's a gun battle with a lot of slow-mo and a lot of broken glass.

everywhere and it's very John Wu. In terms of geopolitics, it's notable perhaps that the enemy is a rogue agent with a biological weapon. So you talked about the Cold War paradigm of the first film and how this is moving away from it towards kind of this biological warfare. But interestingly, it's kind of precursor to the Anfrax scare that followed 9-11, where suddenly, you know, people in suburban neighborhoods were being posted anfrax through the mail or whatever. So it's kind of falling between those two poles.

You know, it's a precursor to that. And reminds me of the rock in some ways, which the rock features and... What's that? That's a military organization gone rogue, and they steal bio-weapons. And they're going to launch them from Alcatraz, right? And the rock is before this, 1998? Yeah.

It's also... It kind of reflects, I think, some of the... I think it reflects some of the sort of anxieties of the period around war, right? I am kind of reaching a little bit here, but, you know, you got to remember this is kind of around the time where I would say, like, one of the biggest international boogeymen at the time was probably Saddam Hussein, right? And, you know, you had the Gulf War and the 90s, and it was a lot about chemical weapons programs and use of chemical weapons and all the rest of it. Like, this is kind of the, you know, in the same way that kind of like the specter of. nuclear war was the thing which was causing a lot of

the paranoia and anxiety that you see in spy films and, you know, cold war focused films earlier, including the First Mission Impossible film. I would argue that's kind of the thing, you know, and the way that once you get past this film, you start to kind of like see a lot more

kind of paranoia over you know, terrorists and terror you know, kind of like ideologically driven terror I'm here, it's kind of like, we're in that period where I think chemical weapons is kind of the international sort of, you know,

boogie figure here. Yes, that's a good shout, particularly the Saddam Hussein connection. Because by this point, Saddam Hussein had been, you know, known for his antagonistic role in the Gulf War and his use of chemical weapons,

his defense minister, Chemical Alley, who used chemical weapons against the Kurds. So, yeah, very much in that chemical biological weapon paradigm. Yes, but it's very apolitical as well. Yeah, so this is something that comes through in Pat Cassell's article in the Los Angeles Review of Books that I talked about on the last episode. This is almost a very apolitical film in some ways.

He says that the subtexts is that politics themselves are outdated, so it's very kind of end of history like we talked about last time and he says although ostensibly about a man man plotting to unleash a deadly

virus the movie is totally disinterested in exploring anything scary or contentious about global terror one of its

villains a greedy pharmaceutical executive played by Brennan Gleason is so one dimensional that he sums up

his entire motivation by hissing I'm in business to make money it's the only installment Cassell says where

the villain is motivated purely by money and eventually it'll just end up with them trading stock options later in the film and he says he says it's easy to blame the failure of the film on the grotesque mountain dew drenched aesthetic of the early 2000s which put hunt in Oakley sunglasses

and let Limp Biscuit loose on the soundtrack but I for one will not scape to go Fred Durst the flaw was the film's decision to abandon a deeper look at the ethics of spy crows in favour of immediate century pleasures. In other words, it did it all from the Nuckey, he writes. I didn't write that. But yeah, there's really not a lot of thought about the biological weapon.

It is just a MacGuffin that is used to put the plot in motion. So, after this gun battle, though at a stalemate, Ambrose villainously confronts Hunt Ambrose makes Naya go get the injection gun but she injects herself with it and then asks Hunt to kill her to destroy the virus I've written wouldn't that destroy the virus question mark because they'll still be alive in her bloodstream

right at least for some time I don't know like I say there's not a lot of thought put into the virus what I will see is this part of the as part of the film also includes my favourite two grey scot moment, which I

think I posted about this on social media when I re-watched it where he just completely unexpected, my view. I don't think I've ever seen it in a film, a big Hollywood film before or since is in an attempt to get them to stop shooting, right? And he's worried that they're

going to, you know, smash the vial with the virus in it, right? And he just shouts at the top of his voice, but suck in it! I'm just like, I don't think I've ever seen that in another bit, like, and the way I've phrased it was, it was just like, he just sounded like some, like, middle class fife dad trying to hear, like, the football scores on the radio over his family. I just thought it was absolutely hilarious. It's like, I'd never, I don't think I'll ever see that again, and there's just something really quite funny about it to me. Joking aside, I do actually really like this scene. It is preposterous, right? In particular, you know, the, um, the, um, the, um, the, um, the, um, the, um, the, um, um, the, um, the, um, um, the, um, um, lighting in this scene, like the lighting right kind of... Yeah, like, it's completely absurd. Like, you know, I've worked in scientific labs

and I can assure you they do not look like that, right? You know, with this weird sort of like sci-fi lighting, almost, you know. But I... Yeah, but, you know, I like it. I also want to give a shout out to, at the point we're at here, where the injection occurs is I think this is the best point with the music of the film

right so the score by Hans Zimmer and I was trying to put it I did a bit digging on it because I was trying to figure out what it reminded me of right because I really think it works very well and it includes some vocals from Lisa Gerard

who also did music with Hans Zimmer for Gladiator and that's exactly what it reminds me and of course Gladiator came out the same year as this as we've already already discussed, but there's something about the John Woo visuals and the slow-mo and the very over-ampt action, and this music with the vocals where it suddenly becomes very operatic, right? It's one of the parts of the film that I actually think really works pretty well. It's really unfortunate that prior to this, there's so much crappid in the first

half-hour, and we've got this very distasteful, shall we say, kind of like framing of the female role that then this scene pivots around because I actually think this scene works really well and I think the music is a huge part of that so it just goes to show like when certain things work or like when the music comes in

and the stylised visuals and all the rest of it there is a film in here that I think really could have worked right and really could have had that you know that different feel to it compared to the first mission possible and could have worked right but I think the real failing here is the script

And I think this is probably a key example of that because none of the stuff that works about this scene is the dialogue. It's everything else. Everything else, when it's put together properly, it actually works really quite well. I actually think it's quite memorable. But as soon as any of the characters are to open their gob and deliver any of the dialogue in the script,

the whole thing just falls apart. Yes. No, I agree. There's something about Naya injecting herself with the virus that works pretty well. It now has a 20-hour incubation period or whatever before it becomes active, so they need to save her within 20 hours, so there's a ticking clock. Someone shoots something that makes a security alert go off in the building,

which didn't go off during the gun battle that was five minutes previous to this. Hunt refuses to kill Naya, saying he'll get her the cure, he explodes the wall, and then he jumps out of the building and parachutes away. Then the gang can't locate Naya because their computer for tracking her is busted. But fortunately, BioCite has a Bond villain lair in an island off the Australian coast where Gleeson is meeting with Ambrose to pay him for the virus and the antivirus. And he says, I don't want money. I want stock. I want to invest in your company because it'll go up because we're going to release the virus and then everyone will want to buy the antivirus. It becomes all about stock options and trading stock. and blah, blah, blah, and they get a bank transfer on the go as another ticking clock.

It's all about taxes on trade routes by the Trade Federation. No, that was a year before. You know, to reference another film of the era. It was the end of history. All they had left was economics, neoliberal economics in particular. And Naya is dropped off somewhere in Sydney to, start a pandemic in a in a few hours so hunt sneaks into the bond villain lair and sneaks towards where they're they're having the the meeting he blows up a door at one point the door to the room

that ambrose and gleason are in and there's all fire and a dove flies through the flames in front of ephan who just walked past the door that he's blown up and doesn't go in the room yeah You see, the problem is, right, this is ridiculous, but this is firmly at the point of the film where I'm into it. Like, I'm just into it. It's like, you know, he's this sort of like avenging angel just kind of like haunting the thing. I actually kind of like it.

It's where kind of like, I don't know where all the John Wooness of it just starts to kind of like just be allowed to be, you know? I was about to say I don't want to create the impression that I'm down on John Wu because there is a scene at the end of face-off where John Travolta and Nicholas Cage's characters face-off, the titular face-off,

in an abandoned church or whatever, on a beach, and there's doves all over the show. John Wu loves doves everywhere. There's doves all over this church where they face off. And it's a great scene. It leans into John Wu's John Wooiness.

The John Wooiness of it all. But here with Ethan Hunt, it just doesn't work for me because I think it feels so different from the character established in the last film that it's a cognitive psychological hurdle that I cannot get past. I want more of the SpyCraft, is what I'm saying, and less of this John Wooiness, which I like in Face Off, but here it just feels out of place. I think we're adopting that as the technical term, by the way,

the John wooiness The John wooiness Well we get to the next one I'll say that it's no longer has the same levels of John wooiness No No not at all The franchise will actively steer away

From this level of John wooiness In the future Yeah So Hunt fight Even Hunt fights his way to Ambrose Blah blah blah They're transferring the money Ultimately Hunt ends up getting dragged

Before Ambrose and tortured a bit And Ambrose decides We'll just finish it here and he shoots Hunt in the head smugly. But then as Ethan's body rolls over, he notices a bandage on his finger, indicating that no, it was the South African bodyguard and not Ethan Hunt.

Hunt rips off the mask that he was wearing as the South African bodyguard and abscondes with the antivirus and escapes. There's a lot more pounding new metal on the soundtrack. The helicopter can't pick him up, so he runs away, he shoots a dude while he. jumping through the air. A motorcyclist comes after him

but just gives him a chance to steal a motorbike and this leads to the climax of the film where there's a motorbike chase

where some cars blow up and there's lots of slow-mo there's almost jousting but with guns and motorbikes where Ethan's at one end

of the road and Ambrose is at the other and they zoom towards each other shooting yeah I remember this light-action scene

just being in one field where they rev motorbikes a lot that's what I remember of the last thing I will confess re-watching this actually I did like this motorcycle chain like I did like this chassis quite a bit there's a couple of kind of

like you know shot choices that I think are really really good in particular there's one where the camera is on the bike and kind of like it's sliding all the place and then suddenly the wheel kind of like grips back on the road and it's I think there's a lot about it that is well done I think you know we'll get to it when we come to later

films and I can't actually remember whether it was the fourth of the fifth one, or both even, but it's another example of something that I think these films go on to do better, you know, I think there are better examples of this in this franchise, and it's like, in some ways it is a shame

that some of the good aspects of this film get caught up in, as I've said, such a really terrible script, actually. Because there is a lot about this sequence that I like, but it's just, it just, it feels, it just, it just feels like a lesser version of other things that it's done, really.

Yeah, I think I've lost patience with the film by this point. It's two, were we? But ultimately, it ends up with a knife fight on a beach, where Hunt is punching Ambrose in the face repeatedly. There's a few sorts of Naya, so we remember that there is a woman in this film. Yeah, she's just been cast loose into Sydney at this point. left to wander the countryside around Sydney she's about to kill herself to destroy the virus

she's on the edge of a cliff literally but enough of that let's see a somersault yeah but the two men the two men fight symbolically over the woman there's this scene where that ambrose gets a knife and gets it very close to the eye of Ethan Hunt which Tom Cruise insisted be done with a real knife

there's steel attached to it there's a tether attached to it so he was in less danger like this is a good example of just how like you'll probably like this gets brought up this is insane person behaviour

this is this is truly insane person behaviour right there are established like methods for getting that type of shot you know this one we're kind of like you know somebody's going into stab somebody and you know it needs to look like you're struggling right and the one that I

the one that I've heard is kind of like the people do the opposite of the thing that it looks like they're doing, right? So the person stabbing tries to pull away, and the person who's being stabbed tries to pull to, right, you know, so that kind of like there's a failure of things, then, you know, you don't end up with the sort of. So, like, this idea, like, attach it to a cable and bring it within two millimetres eye. It's, this is insane person behaviour. And this will be a recurring theme as we get into the later films, in particular when we examined. gap between this film and the next film. Tom Cruise is an insane person and people shouldn't

listen to him. He's an insane person. You know, and this is a good example of it as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. I mentioned earlier that we're getting the kind of nascent sense of Tom Cruise being, as the Jonathan Colton song has it, Tom Cruise crazy. And this scene is really part of it. So between the free climbing, upsetting Tandy Newton, Tandy Wayne Newton with his insecurities, and asking for a knife to be plunged into his eyes, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, Tom Cruise crazy. Yeah, and let me be quite clear here. I'm not doing this as a ha, shucks that Tom Cruise, he's crazy, got to love him. I'm not doing, like, no, I think he's an insane person and people should not listen to him. He's a nutter. I just want, I'm going to be explicit about that. It's not a sort of ironic You know ironic Like oh yeah you'll do anything for cinema

That crazy Tom Cruise No I think he's an insane person By this point He is involved in I will talk about Scientology a lot more In later films Because I think it becomes more relevant And Cruz makes it more relevant

But he is already involved in Scientology The Church of Scientology By this point Because he married Mimi Rogers in 1987 and Rogers had grown up in Scientology

so he becomes involved in it through his marriage to Mimi Rogers ultimately becoming the kind of not kind of the cult leader that he is today where he is an advocate for the Church of Scientology

the cult and one of its most prominent defenders one of its prominent leaders yeah all of it's to say is Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise crazy Ambrose is kicked into a rock and is knocked out but at the last minute he comes to and he's about to shoot

but Hunt kicks a gun up out of the sand twists around and manages to shoot him before Ambrose can get off the shot they give Naya the antivirus they destroy the remaining chimera Hopkins debriefs hunt says that he was supposed to bring back chimera but never mind what a rascal

and he expunges Naya's criminal record Nair and Hunt meet in a very crowded bit of Sydney and they kiss and they live happily ever after the end then there's more new metal over the credits more Limp Biscuit rendition of the theme song not a terribly successful film for me no

there's a lot of things here right so I think this is probably and I'm sorry because I went back and looked like films that I'd watched around about this time and all the rest of it and it's interesting to comparison

you make to Golden Eye right? Because this is not actually a connection I'd made but it is interesting that basically it then plays out like a shit version of Golden Eye, right? Because it does feel indicative to me

of the idea that this style of spy film of espionage film is feeling very tired at this point right yeah um you know and I think it's I think it's notable that the next Bond film that comes out after this

is die another day right I think that's two years later maybe which is awful it's another one of these dreadful films which has like you know it maybe has the odd moment but the script is terrible it's not good and it it basically did

kill that iteration of the the Bond franchise. And when you compare it to that, and I don't think the world is not enough, was particularly well received either. And it's notable that you've got those two Bond films, this one, this Mission Possible film, which is very obviously gone in a more bond-like direction

compared to, you know, the first one. I find it interesting that, like, some of the more popular spy films around this time are pastiches of the likes of this sort of film, right? one of the most popular franchise at this point is probably Austin Powers frankly right you know it's basically making fun of this

sort of thing and then it really does show that shift because this is the same time where you do this kind of like classic good versus bad it's all very black and white and kind of you know glamorous and all the rest of it and then you compare that again to the board and films

and the influence they'll go on to have right because we're smack bang now in the period where die another day will come out it's going to tank critically, the Boren films are ramping up, and then you'll get that Bond reboot in 2006 with Casino Royale, which of course is the same year that the next mission possible film is going to come out, right? So we'll talk about that more when we get to that one, but I do find it interesting that when you compare it against those other films, they're all indicative of this kind of like slightly tired style of film, which is going out of fashion, which is why

the comparison to Golden Eyes, an interesting one, because it is effectively, and so in a lot of of ways that you've pointed out, it's kind of a tired, cliched version of that film, right? Which also came out several years before. I mean, it's not that... Five years before, yeah, it's not that long before, but it does feel like a different era of filmmaking in the same way that the original mission possible does. It does feel like it's kind of running out of ideas and falling back to this kind of, you know, ugly, misogynistic sort of, you know, action.

film by numbers type thing. There's a lot you can find about the James Bondification that they attempt in this film. So I've put a couple of references in the Zotero library for this episode, which is the link will be in the show notes. But there's, yeah, there's a Reddit post that lays out all this James Bondification. There's also an article in film stories by a friend of the pod at AJ Black, who writes that Mission Impossible 2 attempts to establish Ethan Hunt as an American. can take on the James Bond legend, the swaggering dangerous agent traveling to exotic locales, Australia, bedding glamorous femme fatals while stopping maniacal bad guys from unleasing a terrible

weapon of mass destruction on the world. Compare this to the first mission, and we're a world away in sensibility. De Palma may have framed the picture around Hunt, but even with the destruction of his team, at no point can Hunt successfully expose Phelps' plan without the ramshackle team of mercenaries he assembles to clear his name. By contrast here, Hunt is, you know, the one-man super agent. From the start of the film, that's what the free-climbing scene is intended to

to evoke and establish. And it's very much written into how Anthony Hopkins treats him and how the other characters, the other members of his team, even Ring Rames, are side characters. I didn't even mention. them in my summary after they were introduced because they're not relevant because

they're just support for Hunts James Bond shenanigans. So yeah, it is interesting that it's so golden eye and so James Bond when Bond is so outdated by this point, when the Bond paradigm feels so outdated and will come into a radical reinvention after dying of a day when they get Daniel Craig to kind of go back to basics with Casino Realt. But it's very strange. I would love to know why John Wu turned down Golden Eye and what he thought of doing that afterwards.

Yeah, it's an interesting... We'll probably talk about this more when we get into the next film, right? Because there is an element with this series about kind of Tom Cruise's public persona as we go with it. And I think it's hard for me to remember specifically around this time, especially given that, you know, I wasn't reading a lot of celebrity gossip rags when I was 13 years old, right? But I feel like this is before kind of the, um, the Scientology thing has become like a, you know, the dominant narrative around Cruz's public persona, right?

Well, he would have done eyes wide shut the year before, right? So that was 1999. And that was kind of, that was very well publicised as Stanley Kubrick banking on this. figure of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who he was married to at the time, banking on this kind of the notoriety of this celebrity couple and using that and kind of taking a look at its sexuality, or lack thereof, the sexlessness almost of that celebrity pairing is what Kubrick's looking at his eyes wide shut. So I think there's certainly that awareness of Tom Cruise. That is how Tom Cruise, I think, is perceived around.

this time. It's hard to say, but yeah. You know, because you've got that and we'll probably get, you know, we'll get into more than the next one because I think that plays a little bit into kind of like the gap between the two, right? But I feel like this is, it's almost like this is a weird symptom, to me, anyway, if I just, if I look at Tom Cruise's filmography, it feels a little bit to me like him taking a creative swing that doesn't really work out, right? Because if you look at kind of like what the work he's doing is an actor around this time, right? The year before, you've already said, eyes wide shut, right? It's also where he has, what for me I think is one of his better performances as Frank T.J. Mackie and Magnolia.

Right. So he's worked with Paul Thomas Anderson. Right. So the year before, he's worked with Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson. It then, he then goes on a run where he's working with, you know, vaguely utter-like figures or notable directors. You've got Vanilla Sky, which I think was Cameron Crow at the time, but that's a very out there, out there film. You've got Minority Report and War of the Worlds, which were both Spielberg. You've got The Last Samurai, which was a sort of an interesting role for him. And then you got collateral, where he's kind of going against type a little bit. He's a villain. It's a, you know, Michael Mann film.

Like, the point is, it's like, it almost feels like this, this is kind of like, this weird internet. And I realize it's the start of this run, so this doesn't quite work. But it feels like it's this attempt to meld this desire to work with kind of like utter-like creative figures with his movie star persona, whereas you then look at the next phase of his career after that, starting more or less with the next Mission Impossible film, where he is Tom Cruise is more of the creative force. And that kind of like comes to the forward and kind of like, you know, the selection of stunts for the other mission. possible films you've got like this choice of roles and that you know you had that jack reacher film that came out um you know and like we're we're getting less kind of um iconoclass

directors behind this right and it's almost like the choice of john woo is an attempt to do that and i'd find it interesting and we'll talk about this when we get to the very end of the series right when we talk about a film which is not released at the time of recording i find it interesting if you look at the kind of like Cruz's upcoming work, you've got the final reckoning coming out in 2025, and the only other film that's on his thing is an Alejandro Gonzales in Yoritu film, which I find interesting, because it's gone through this big period where kind of, you know, it's more, you know, I don't want to be dismissive of, you know, Christopher Macquarie, right, because he's made some films that I'm very fond of, but he's not the same type of

director as Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, even like, you know, it's, that's less, that's less what his filmmaking style is about, I think. So I find this film an interesting one there, and it's kind of like this weird

kind of crossover between that, this period of Cruz's career where he's working with that type of director and where he's the driving force, he's the driving creative force. It's an interesting one in that respect. It's a shame that the result is rather tiresome, but as a kind of like, you know, as a combination of those things, I do find it quite

interesting from a, you know, trajectory standpoint for him. Yeah, I mean, it's a common trajectory for people to go from actors to producers, but he is doing it so publicly and so in front of the camera that it makes it a very interesting trajectory and an interesting commentary on on how people in Hollywood make this move. Yeah, it's the in front of the Canberra bit that's kind of the you know, because like I can think of plenty of

plenty of examples. The one that most obviously springs to mind actually just off the top of my head is actually Brad Pitt right, and you know, he's not the only founder of that plan B production company, but obviously he's one of kind of like the key figures and, you know, a company's won Oscars production, but he's not, like with the odd

exception, I think, 12 years of slave is one where he's got a bit bar. not in these films, right? Whereas Cruz, he's the guy, right? And that's kind of almost part of the sale of the whole film. He's in them and he's the face of them. Like, as Tom Cruise, he is the face of them. He will do a trailer as himself saying, you know, come to the movies, come to the cinema,

come and see the latest mission impossible. Which he isn't doing here, but, you know, will develop. He's in that transitional point he's transitioning to that point at this stage through i think this film and the next film uh mission impossible three i think the reasons why it don't work we have gone into there's too much john moorification it's attempting to be james bond in a way that fails it is attempting to make even hunt sexy and there's a very charged sense of heteronormative sexuality in the film but it doesn't work because Tom Cruise is not sexy he's weird and and it just comes across as misogyny and ultimately is embedded in this kind of

casual early 2000s misogyny too much in a way that is not sexy that is unpleasant and it's a time capsule and this film is a time capsule of the early 2000s so it's you know, the high octane, new metal, limp biscuit, all the computers look like DVD menus. It's super early 2000s. I didn't even mention, I didn't even mention the opening title graphic. It really looks like a YouTube video from 2005 or something. So I mean, it was like, technically does that make it ahead of its time in 2000?

I don't know, but that genuinely is what it looks like. I think somebody watching it now seeing that title graphic and probably think they were watching like some bootleg copy that didn't have the actual title graphic and it's not it's just, it's aged

you know like this is the thing on the internet and you say it has aged like milk frankly I really do think it has but yeah absolutely so it really doesn't work for me I was saying to Jim before we started recording I did a ranking of these

films a couple of years ago when I watched them all and I was surprised at how high I've got this film. We'll redo our rankings as we always do at the end of these series at the end so I'll probably redo the ranking but I was surprised by how high it is.

I think last time I found the John Wuriener's fun in the same way you have done here and now even just a few years on I don't have the patience for it anymore. It's also it's another it also has another symptom of Hollywood and I feel like this is also

around about the time where I feel like Hollywood was obsessed with remaking and rejigging kind of like the best parts of Asian cinema for itself Oh yeah You know like this is the year

This is also the year at Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon came out Now Angley had made English language films before that But like you know After this a few years He'll make Hulk You know

Infernal Affairs which I was a big fan of at the time when I had on DVD came out in 2002 and that would prove to be very popular and ultimately would get remade as the Departed Yeah and then you got The Old Boy would come out in 2003 which again was very popular

Part Chand Wick would become very popular and ultimately that film much later on than this would be remake as well I think the year before was the original version of Bangkok Dangerous which would get remade There's a lot of Japanese horror films coming out around this time that we'd end up

getting remade. I feel like this is this period, you know. Yeah, battle war I'll. Yeah, exactly, right. I think that was the year 2000. I mean, that's later than Mission Impossible, but yeah, same year. And that becomes very popular in the West.

You know, so like, there's a bit of that going on here as well, and I think it maybe hadn't quite it hadn't quite figured out how to do that. I don't think it's fair to say Right, I think this is an attempt to kind of take the director and make them make a classic Hollywood action franchise. And I think this is before the point where you've really figured out how to do that.

I think there are films that will go on to do this sort of thing later that do it better. And in some cases, when you think about sort of like, I think we'll get more into a mode where for, I don't know, I'm probably going to be because of some people annoyed here. I think we're a lot more comfortable with the idea of watching a film in a foreign language of subtitles now than we were then, right? I still don't think it's great, right, but I think it's definitely a more established thing now and it was then. Like, you know, if Parasite or its equivalent was being released in the year 2000, it's not winning Best Picture in the year 2000. You know, that's the sort of thing I'm talking about here. No, I think during this period the early 2000, there is a poll. like you say, a pull from Asian cinema.

We're pulling Asian cinema over and getting used to it. Whereas now Hollywood is actively trying to push American cinema onto Asia. So, you know, the Marvel films have to have a Chinese character or an Asian character in them. There has to be something for the Chinese market. They have to censor themselves in some point, do alternate cuts for the Chinese market to get past the Chinese state censors. So it's a very different approach to. Asia, an Asian cinema that is reflected in this

film. That's an awfully big generalisation, but I think it's an interesting point. So that was Mission Impossible 2, the first sequel to the Mission Impossible, the second entry in the franchise. And next time we'll be discussing Mission Impossible

3, 2006, six years later, J.J. Abrams has a go at doing a Mission Impossible film. Q Lens Fleer of Thank you. Cue Lensflare,

cue his friends Alex Kirtzman and Roberto Orkey, who destroyed the Star Trek franchise. But that's a complaint for next time. But it is funny that Alex Kirtzman, you get some of two phases of Star Trek in this because Ronald D. Moore and Brian Brager, Bannan Braga were involved in Mission Impossible 2 and they were big in Next Generation,

Deep Space 9. Voyager. And then by the next film we have Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Walker who helped reboot the Star Trek movie franchise with the Star Trek films and then Alex Kurtzman has been destroying the TV

franchise with Discovery and Picard and most recently the Section 31 movie. So, the question, because I've never actually asked you, would you describe yourself as a trekkie, Simon? Yes. I think so. Yeah, because I've asked a few folks. I've asked a few My best man definitely would, right?

And I've asked him this. What are your feelings about the Star Trek reboot that JJ Abrams did, just as a lead into the next episode? They've gone downhill since I originally saw it. Because I think I liked it when it came out, but I'm a lot more ambivalent now, as I have got more into, quote, classic Trek. As I've got more into, you know, TNG,

what's all of Deep Space Nine? and watch the old films I'm a lot more antagonistic towards it I think it does a lot of things that I find very annoying that find their full expression in Discovery and Picard

which are fully annoying yeah isn't it right because just to set the stall out and I'll do this at the start next episode I'm not going to get into mission possible through your JJ Abrams wider filmography but Star Trek into darkness right, the second one, I feel like is a bellwether for me

very much an indicator of everything that is wrong with the modern blockbuster. So, anyway, we can get into that next time, but there you go, say it's a deal. I think we will, because I think there's a lot of that DNA in Mission Impossible 3. But we'll discuss that next time. So join us next month for a full discussion of JJ Abrams, Measure Impossible 3 and Star Trek into darkness Until then Please rate and review

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To read coverage of festival and art house Cinema Yeah thank you very much for listening Thank you, Jim. No problem. And we'll see you next time to discuss more of Mission Impossible on the Impossabod. Thank you.