Movie begins with Cruise climbing an impossibly sheer cliff. He slips; he recovers; he hangs ten several thousand feet off the ground. This being a John Woo film, credibility is not a very big issue, but “cool” is--as it turns out, the entire elaborate rock-climbing sequence was staged just so Cruise can rendezvous with a pair of telecommunicating Ray-Bans, shot at him via rocket launcher from a hovering helicopter. The shades instruct Cruise on what he is to do for the next two hours…which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up how Cruise has handled his acting career to date.
Welcome to Mission Impossible 2, or as the impossible-to-avoid marketing blitz has been shrieking at us for the past few months: MI:2! MI:2! Lalo Schifrin’s music pounds away like a masseur on massive caffeine overdose; the movie flings explosions, automatic gunfire, flying motorcycles at our faces as if they would go out of fashion by tomorrow (actually they have, years ago, but no one wants to admit it).
Let’s cut to the chase: Woo here is hardly at his best. Back when he was making Hong Kong action flicks he used fast cuts and tightheld shots to generate excitement-- basic tools in an action director’s trade, brought by Woo to a new level of virtuosity. His action is swift enough and extravagant enough to be just this side of impossible, and part of the thrill is in pulling off those stunts with little more than a camera and a few nimble actors (if you say “easy enough, given a few editing tricks,” you haven’t seen Woo’s films). MI:2 digitally tweaks these action sequences so that they’re just this side of this side of his usual standard of impossible. He’s pushed his action further, but the thrill is gone: you know it’s all done with the push of a keyboard button.
Still, there's grace and elan to the action; if Woo is simply pushing buttons, at least he pushes with style. Substandard Woo is still head and shoulders above hacks like Michael Bay (The Rock) or Simon West (Con Air), the secret being Woo choreographs his action (even digitized) not simply as action but as musical numbers ( not for nothing does the film pay homage to West Side Story). Bay and West will cut and shoot for impact and maximum crunch, but Woo goes for rhythm and flow; the sequences sing, if slightly off key and to a more mediocre melody.
But there’s more to Woo than just action; if there wasn’t, we can dismiss him as a nimbler Tony Scott, a more talented Robert Rodriguez. Woo's known for the homoerotic intensity of his male relationships-- witness Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Chow Yun Fat in Hard Boiled or Chow and Danny Lee in The Killer, or even the three childhood friends--Tony Leung (again), Jacky Cheung, and Waise Lee--in Bullet in the Head. Woo piles on the male-bonding romanticism till your cup runneth over; he presents two (or three) friends almost as lovers, looking at each other with moist and longing eyes (if totally chaste; they may lay down their life for each other but never for a second is it suggested that they would lay each other).
Cruise, on the other hand, is all by his self-regarding self in MI:2; he isn’t helped--or makes sure he gets no help (read: competition) from his costars. Dougray Scott, engaging as a hapless prince in Ever After, makes for a pallid supervillain; Thandie Newton is gorgeous beyond belief and performs a crucial act of self-sacrifice, but does little else (women are little more than decorative accessories in John’s Wooniverse).
All this might not have mattered--digitized action, bloodless adversary, unmemorable cast--if the film didn’t have such a hollow bore as producer er center; I’m speaking of the Cruise Missile, a wet firecracker if I ever saw one. Brian De Palma, who directed the first Mission Impossible, seemed to have a better handle on Tom’s limitations as an actor-- he kept his star quiet and intense for most of the film, distracting you with Robert Towne’s overcomplicated screenplay and a few amusing cameos (a sharp Jon Voight, an even better Vanessa Redgrave). Woo is too much of a straight man; he takes Cruise’s stardom at face value, presenting Cruise as red-hot lover (Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut made a more accurate assessment of the vertically-challenged Cruise’s romantic appeal, or total lack of), and as all-around superhero and martial artist (Cruise is not and never will be Jet Li, no matter how many gigabytes are spent digitizing his roundhouse kicks).
Robert Towne, again writing the screenplay, doesn’t help matters by lifting the basic plotline of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious with Thandie playing double agent between Cruise and Scott. While Cruise pines for Thandie… who squirms under Scott… who’s suspicious of the two of them… you can’t help but feel that Woo, a sucker for love triangles (check out Once a Thief or better yet the aforementioned Bullet in the Head), could have gotten better mileage out of the material if he had an actor with real talent to work with: Nicholas Cage maybe or better yet, Woo’s original cinematic alter ego, Chow Yun Fat. Chow threw off sparks practically all by himself in Anna and the King (Jodie Foster wasn’t much help); he would have taken to Cruise’s role of pimp and lover with understated flair and great natural ease. Someone should take up a collection to get these two-- Chow and Woo-- together again and soon. Meanwhile, someone should take up another collection and buy Cruise a pair of platform shoes.
As for a film with some real storytelling--how about checking out Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes’ Rosetta, showing for the entire day on July 20, Thursday, at Glorietta 4, as part of the Best of Cinemanila series?
The film, winner of the 1999 Golden Palm at Cannes, is the plainspoken story of a girl named Rosetta who, as the film begins, has just lost her job, and is being dragged kicking and screaming away.
A grim film, as grim as any I’ve seen-- Rosetta, soft pink face set in emotional granite, goes forth to survive by any means possible, and the film chronicles the full implication of the term “any means.” She scrimps and saves every penny; she holds on to scrap of cloth or wire or potentially useful material of any kind as if they were gold-- which to her they are. She sets fishing lines by a muddy river to catch muddy fish, and asks for job openings at every establishment she walks into. When she finally gets a chance, at the kitchen of a Belgian waffle manufacturer, she works with an intensity so fierce they won’t have any excuse to fire her. When she is fired anyway-- because the owner has to give the job to his son-- Rosetta struggles with equal ferocity, clutching a heavy sack of flour as tightly as if it was a life-buoy and she was about to go under.
The Dardennes brothers, who did the powerful (and to my mind even better) La Promesse, like to tell their social-realist tales straight-- not for them the reality-snapping kicks and punches of Cruise on Woo mode. The film is shot almost entirely with a handheld camera (avoid the front seats of the theater if you don’t want to get dizzy); there’s no artificial lighting to speak of, no special effects or set design, no music. It could almost be a Dogme 95 film, except that it’s set in Belgium and far less pretentious-- the Dardennes only want to tell their story, not set a trendy new fashion in filmmaking. Emilie Dequenne as Rosetta looks impossibly young, seems impossibly real-- you wonder if she ever manages to shake off her character’s unstoppable anger when she steps away from the camera.
Aside from the deus ex machina ending, there’s little to fault in Rosetta, a refreshingly honest and straightforward film, an antidote to the excess and noise of the standard Hollywood blockbuster. And especially after the digitized fizz of something like MI:2 with its lukewarm lead star this film hits you like a shot of Scotch, straight, no chaser.
First published in Businessworld 11.4.00
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