With the first Mission: Impossible movie garnering decent enough reviews and a respectable box office, a sequel was only a matter of time. With Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames the only returning actors, a new director, a whole new talented cast on board, and the only significant ‘baggage’ from the series in the form of Phelps having been disposed of in the previous entry, hopes were high that a brave new path could be forged for the franchise. But could M:I-2 stay loyal to its brand while expanding into new horizons?

When a former IMF agent sets out to steal a deadly new bioengineered virus and its specially developed cure, agent Ethan Hunt is called upon to recruit the man’s ex-lover to try to help him stop a deadly attack that could wipe out a significant chunk of the world’s population.

Just five months separate the release of M:I-2 and another spy genre film – Charlie’s Angels – and yet in its opening sequence alone McG’s silly action comedy based on another old TV show takes an almost spookily prescient swipe at its more serious stablemate in a scene that feels as if it’s deliberately aping the other movie. This observation alone gets right to the heart of what M:I-2 is about – unlike its predecessor, this is no serious, modernised take on the genre, but rather the very type of action movie with guns and explosions posing as a spy movie that the first movie avoided being. And it hits every cliché from that genre so hard and so perfectly that even a movie which probably wasn’t directly parodying it specifically so much as it was the genre in general feels savagely on point.

That first scene does so much to set up what’s to come. The odd monologue from Russian Scientist Dr Nekhorvich to ‘Dimitry’ (his apparent name for Hunt), the meeting on the plane, the rubber mask reveal, and the plane crash as the bad guys escape. It’s all so overblown, so unnecessary and altogether too much like the stereotypical ‘Evil Guy’ plan to the extent that you almost expect to see them all retreat to a secret volcano lair somewhere to demand a ransom from the World Government.

Hunt’s actual introduction is no better – free climbing up a sheer rock face in a scene that seems calculated to demonstrate just how proud Cruise was of his physique and tough-guy credentials at the time more than it does to really introduce the character. Sure, you can argue that it feeds into Hunt’s already established character trait of being a gambler, but generally when he gambled in the last film it was to accomplish the mission, not for fun. The appearance of the helicopter at the top, the delivery of the message, the wry ‘If I told you where I was going, it wouldn’t be a vacation’ (an attempt at a catchphrase that thankfully didn’t make it into the franchise as a whole) is all so very much action cliché, culminating with the glasses which deliver the message exploding as they self-destruct (rather than the simple puff of smoke we usually get) towards the viewer at the screen. This leads into a credits sequence with more explosions and backed by Limp Bizkit’s rendition of the classic theme as part of their tie-in single, just in case, by this point, you were in any doubt as to the tone of what’s coming.

For what it’s worth, there’s a decent cast on hand here, and by and large they valiantly do their best with the material that’s before them. Thandie Newton impresses, her character Nyah Nordoff-Hall transcending the narrow boundaries the script seems intent on laying out for her by sheer force of performance alone. Introduced as a high-class thief who Hunt must recruit (he assumes) to steal back the Bellerophon, it then transpires that she used to date Dougray Scott’s Sean Ambrose, the main villain, and that Hunt’s boss wants her to use her charms to wile her way back into Ambrose’s bed and (hopefully) his confidences. Of course, the Secretary (played here by Anthony Hopkins, who gives every impression of having turned up for a laugh and a paycheque) doesn’t choose to impart this last detail until after Hunt has already been captivated by Nyah and fallen into bed with her, so that the story can add more tension to the whole conceit of the mission she’s required to undertake (because apparently Mr Secretary here has a mentality from circa 1950 so forcing a woman to sleep with a man she’s no longer interested in causes no tension in and of itself at all). Indeed, as Hopkins’ character puts it when Hunt objects that Nyah has no training for this ‘Training for what? To sleep with a man and lie? She’s a woman, she has all the training she needs.’ You could, I suppose, argue that the movie, from Hunt’s point of view, is actually trying to be a little enlightened, but then again I can never quite escape the feeling that Hunt’s issue here is more that he has to send his girlfriend off to sleep with another guy rather than that he’s much bothered about how she feels on the matter.

To backtrack a second – the reason why Sean Ambrose is so well-known to Hunt is that not only is he ex-IMF but he’s actually an ex stand-in for Hunt, used when Hunt wasn’t available (hence his ability to mimic him in the opening). It turns out that Mr Secretary actually sent Ambrose to retrieve the Bellerophon and yet this is never addressed again once revealed. It’s made clear that Hunt has always harboured serious reservations about Ambrose and a personal dislike for the man’s methods, but apparently none of this occurred to the IMF boss when deciding to send him to meet a trusted confidant of Hunt.

And as to Ambrose himself – not Dougray Scott’s finest hour. It’s a well-known Hollywood factoid that Hugh Jackman owes his career-making turn as Wolverine in Fox’s X Men franchise to Scott’s unavailability for the role, as he was filming this. I wonder how often Scott regrets this. Here, he’s given all the worst clichés and tropes to negotiate as both leading bad guy and Hunt’s personal nemesis. He doesn’t so much chew the scenery as devour it whole. His interactions with number 2, Hugh Stamper, played as South African by Australian actor Richard Roxburgh, are actually cringe-inducing. Stamper is suspicious of Nyah’s reappearance from the outset, conveniently timed as it is, yet Ambrose chooses to ignore this, declaring that he can have his fun whether she’s there for genuine reasons or not. This is somewhat undermined by his emotional reaction to the realisation that she’s clearly got eyes only for Hunt, but more importantly it’s never clear why of the two of them, Ambrose is the boss. Stamper is consistently more situationally aware, cleverer and clearly more than capable of handling himself, and we never really see anything on screen to convince us of exactly why Ambrose gets to boss him around. The scene where Ambrose literally snips the tip off his finger with a cigar guillotine for daring to question him only makes sense if Stamper has some reason to fear Ambrose, yet we are left to imagine one.

But this is before we address the central plot, and the mass of holes which run right through it. Having been told that Ambrose had Bellerophon (and presumably Chimera) at the start of the film, why don’t IMF (or just the US government) immediately contact Biocyte Pharmaceuticals to get them to synthesise more antidote? When it becomes clear that Ambrose in fact only possesses the antidote on its own, because Nekhorvich had injected himself with the virus to transport it, why not immediately lock down Biocyte’s operations and ensure that Chimera cannot fall into Ambrose’s hands? In terms of the film’s structure, the answer is so that we can have a big set-piece which contrasts the methods of Ambrose and Hunt, the latter staging one of his elaborate high-flying stunts to stealthily infiltrate the building while the former simply smashes in through the front door, all guns blazing. It also sets up a nice John Woo gun fight in all its jumping-in-slow-motion-through-the-air-while-firing-a-gun-in-each-hand glory, and gives Nyah the opportunity to sacrifice herself by injecting the last remaining sample of the virus into her own veins, thereby preventing Ambrose from actually killing her and allowing Hunt an avenue of escape. That’s lovely, but it ignores the huge plot holes the movie creates for itself in order to get there, and given the movie that this is a sequel to, that’s an unforgiveable lack of smartness in the writing.

However the film isn’t all that bothered about that, because it has another set of action set pieces to deliver as we head to the finish line. Nyah has been set loose as some sort of ‘Typhoid Mary’ with the virus she’s carrying, because apparently infecting a lot of people with Chimera is an ideal way for Ambrose to make himself a lot of money by becoming a controlling shareholder in Biocyte who hold the cure. Why Nyah hasn’t infected Ambrose or any of his men already isn’t explained, just like when she finally gets rescued by Hunt delivering Bellerophon to her in the nick of time, nobody mentions why any of the people she was around before she fled to the beach were infected already – that’s a detail, and it’s a detail that doesn’t involve explosions so the movie isn’t interested.

Hunt’s infiltration of Ambrose’s base is peak silliness as he one-man-armys his way through Ambrose’s henchmen, and the twist at the end where he masks himself as Stamper (and correspondingly masks Stamper as himself) is not so much telegraphed as it is screamingly obvious, together with the moment of realisation as Ambrose spots the telltale bandage on the little finger (thereby explaining why the fingertip-snipping bit was required, but still not how it narratively made sense).

Then it’s on to a motorcycle chase sequence that feels as if it lasts about a year, full of improbable slow-motion nonsense that culminates in Hunt and Ambrose literally riding at each other and tacking one another in mid air as they leap from their respective bikes before engaging in fisticuffs on the beach for another ice age or so, complete with so many shots of Tom Cruise doing a two-footed kick to his opponent which necessitates him falling to the floor that you honestly start to realise if maybe the fight co-ordinator had the day off or Cruise simply couldn’t pick up any more moves. Either way, it’s so over the top (and not in the way that the series can be) as to be frankly dull, and it’s somewhat of a relief when it finally ends.

Of all the movies in the franchise, M:I-2 possibly bears the strongest hallmarks of its director. Woo has a specific style, and boy does he stamp it into every shot he can here. His preference for single, male maverick protagonists who shoot first (and a lot) and then don’t bother with the questions afterward because everyone is dead is front and centre – Hunt goes from an intelligent gambler, as likely to think his way out of a problem as use force, in the first movie to a grizzled bruiser. It’s quite the regression, complete with all the accoutrements that the first movie so assiduously avoided, including falling into bed with the girl, charging in single handed into every fight, and overblown stunts. There’s little sense of team here – Luther and Billy are largely just there to sit in the background marvelling at Hunt’s technique. Billy does get to do some flying, and Luther the occasional bit of technical/computer-y back up, but it’s all superficial, and mostly the film prefers to focus on the action as Hunt batters his way from one scene to the next.

It’s an exercise in style over substance, and it’s a style that ages very badly. It’s honestly shocking to watch the film now and grapple with the fact that its predecessor is four years older. Thankfully, it stands out as an exception in the franchise as a whole. This is one mission that Ethan Hunt definitely shouldn’t have accepted.