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To circle back to that opening scene and the two that immediately follow it, Woo and Towne create an air of unease and mild distaste that hang a pall over everything that follows. They’re not the sort I associate with either gentleman and they do color my response to the rest of the film. The opening “sting” on the airplane that ends with the bad guys escaping and everyone on the plane unconscious would be shocking in and of itself, but before the plane is obliterated, the co-pilot groggily recovers long enough to see the plane about to crash into a mountain and the audience is invited to share his terror at his and everyone else’s impending death.

Cut to Ethan rock climbing with only his hands at Dead Horse Point in Utah. At one point he pivots around so his back is against the rock side and he stares directly at the audience for an unnaturally long time. The sequence as a whole exists almost entirely outside of the rest of the plot (unless taken as an example of Ethan still working off the events of the first film) and that pointed gaze, part desperation, part wildness is extremely unnerving.

Anthony Hopkins pops up in an unbilled cameo as Hunt’s boss in the third scene, playing his part with an almost reptilian, disinterested air. He gets the funniest line rebuttal in the movie - “This isn’t Mission: Difficult, Mr. Hunt, it’s Mission: Impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park for you” — and finds something ominous and chilling lurking between the lines, the camera settling in on his face in close-up.

Now, when I think of M:I-2, it’s not the signature Woo birds (pigeons this time) as harbingers of battles to come that I remember, it’s those three faces, terrified, desperate, and disinterested, that come to mind. Whatever they suggest, they do not point the way towards the disjointed action flick that follows.

Next time: “You’re gonna get what you deserve.” At 45, he is now an Academy Award winner and a new dad/first-time changer of diapers. Under his own name and the Nine Inch Nails moniker, Trent Reznor has unleashed some of the most danceable head-banging industrial rock of the last two decades. His albums proper have topped the charts and sold millions. But what about the Nine Inch Nails remix albums? I feel that’s where his true musical genius rests. In a one-off wholly music themed-column I’ll look at Fixed, Further Down The Spiral, Things Falling Apart, Still, and Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, and consider what these musical Chapter Twos have to offer in relation to the albums from which they were borne.

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