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How to watch Mission: Impossible II
2000 · John Woo · Mission: Impossible II on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count how often the film drops into slow motion. (camera)
Jeffrey Kimball and Woo slow the frame constantly: a leap, a turn, a gun coming level, a coat opening. Each stretch holds a body in one shape long enough for you to admire it.
Payoff: Slow motion converts a brawl into a row of poses. The film keeps stopping to show you a picture rather than pushing you to the next event. In the reading: privileged-instants. The reading calls these privileged instants: posed peaks borrowed from sculpture, not the ordinary in-between moments film usually samples.
Watch how Hunt and Ambrose are placed facing each other. (staging)
Woo stages his two men frontally across balanced space, over and over, like halves of one design. The symmetry comes from Shaw Brothers choreography and from his own Hong Kong standoffs.
Payoff: The blocking insists these men are equivalent before any line of dialogue claims it. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls the mirrored duel a gest: a posture that displays the relation between two men instead of accomplishing a task.
Notice that action cuts land on the music, not on the geography. (cutting)
Steven Kemper and Christian Wagner break fights into micro-units and rejoin them on graphic matches timed to Hans Zimmer's beat. You often cannot say where anyone is standing relative to anyone else.
Payoff: Sensation arrives before orientation does. The cutting wants impact on the beat more than it wants a map of the room.
Compare the golden exteriors to the cold blue of the fights. (light)
Spain and Australia are lit warm and lyrical, almost pastoral. Then the action sequences swap in steely blues and hard shadow, and the anamorphic frame flattens front and back into graphic shapes.
Payoff: The palette tells you which mode you are in. Romance gets sunlight, combat gets steel, and the film switches between them without transition.
Listen for guitars pushing into Lalo Schifrin's old tune. (sound)
Zimmer keeps the franchise's famous five-four figure and drives rock instrumentation through the orchestra. During slow motion the sound effects slow with the image, so impact, wind and metal stretch out too.
Payoff: Slowed foley makes violence a sensory texture to savor rather than an event to survive.
Once you have seen it
Watch the doves released during the fight and ask what they accomplish. (staging)
Nothing in the plot requires birds. Woo puts them in the air as bodies collide, slows the frame, and lets them climb through the blur. Critics named them as the most naked signature in the film.
Payoff: They announce that the image has stopped serving the story and started performing for you. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls this an attraction-image: spectacle inserted to be looked at rather than to advance anything.
Count how many times a face turns out to be a mask. (structure)
De Palma used the mask as a spy gadget. Woo runs it until the self becomes a surface with another face underneath. Ambrose and Hunt trade appearances, and the film enjoys the trick more than it explains it.
Payoff: Identity stops being something you uncover and becomes something a character manufactures. The con is the genre.
Watch Thandiwe Newton play more than the plot asks for. (performance)
Nyah is modeled on Kim Novak's role in Vertigo: inserted into danger by a man who withholds his motives, then used. Newton gives her sharpness and resistance the action frame never quite absorbs.
Payoff: Her performance keeps registering a cost the story is in a hurry to settle.
Carry this in: Watch for the moments Woo slows down. He is not decorating the violence. He wants you to look at it like a statue.