I have a question. When Nya is being transported in the helicopter to meet Agent Hunt, why is she the only one vaccinated with the antidote? Don't the other two team members who traveled with her need to be vaccinated too? After all, she is the movie's "typhoid Mary".

Apparently, she wouldn't spread the disease until she died. Don't ask me why.

Another Question: How HORRIBLE was this movie? ugh. When did Tom "Flip Kick" Cruise become an action hero? And how many Matrix like shots are there?

And hey, not that I'm complaining, but what reason was there for Nya to be running around in little tight belly shirts with no bra? I cracked up when I saw her in the lab (the one he had to break into, then got into the firefight) and she's wearing a little shirt 4 sizes too small.

John Woo sure loves his flip kicks. And his "Spin and shoot" move. And Long and boring establishing shots.

And the glowing white dove flying through the fire...How pretentious is that?

I pretty much hated this movie, if you can't tell.

If people can only spread the disease if they die, shouldn't they be hunting down all the rescuers of the plane crash. The scientist who was carrying the disease died.

And, if I was the first officer on the flight,I would be wondering shy the captain was not waring an oxygen mask... Also, why was tom Cruise wearing a regular skydiving rig for a base jump? All of the base jumpers that I know wear a base rig -- they only have one canopy. If it fails, you don't have time to pull the reserve anyway, since you are jumping from less that 1000 feet above ground anyway.

Spornan, I think you're taking the film too seriously. I liked it a lot and only watched it for the enjoyment factor, like what they did with the SPFX. I wasn't watching for nits. I was too busy going ga-ga over Thandie Newton. *S*

Fools! Fools all of you! You're just trying to destroy me! They told me not to take the yellow pills, but I showed them! There can be only one! I have the power! Go past the extreme! Max the envelope and so forth!

I'm not sure about this, but did ethan's motorcycle have two-wheel drive? He did wheelies on both wheels and stayed on them driving. If not, it would be like driving on the front two wheels on a rear-wheel drive car.

THIS POST IS ONE HUGE SPOILER!!!

Maybe it's me, but the spinning tires produced way too much smoke (and I believe you could see the smoke machine at one point, but I'd have to watch it again).
The rubber mask trick was way over used. In addition, several fights occur with masks on (complete with face punches) and the masks stay perfect. Those masks are realistic AND durable.
For a villian who outsmarted Ethan on several occasions, he sure didn't see the obvious. As soon as "Ethan" didn't speak in the Villians evil lair, I knew it wasn't him.
Mission impossible has predominantly been about heros with brains and technology, Ethan Hunt was an insult. The best technology was a DVD player--at LEAST use optical chips.
Good thing you can time this disease down to the minute. If the girl had a weak immune system, it could have been a short movie. Then again, if Ethan had just kidnapped the main villian at the horse race and interrogated him, it would also have been a short movie.
Speaking of diseases, the fact that somebody was going to be injected (hence, the race against the clock) was just way too predictable.
Wow, the villian get's beaten in a fist fight, the hero turns away, the villian tries to attack from behind and gets killed. That was never done in EVERY SINGLE action movie that came before.
As a mindless action film, this could have been worse--so I'm told--but it was definately not Mission Impossible

And, I must correct a nit. Hunt was wearing a base rig when he jumped out of the building. Therefore, he only had one canopy. I still hold that he would not have had time to do a front flip then deploy. None of my base jumping friends do.

And about the masks, they need to get real. Do they really think the audience will believe that these masks can have even the stubble on the chins and dried blood on the nose? Come on.

I forget his name, but the blonde guy Ethan traded faces with, well, didn't he have his mouth open wide enough to see inside of it, or just a little open? Cuz when the mask is removed then you see his mouth was taped. It's been a week or two since I've seen it but that's one nit I did find. And why didn't the bad guy figure something was wrong when "Ethan" didn't say anything before getting shot?

Fake Evil Blonde guy told Real Evil Leader guy that he had broken "ethan's" jaw.

And just how exactly did Ethan get a perfect mask of that guy (who looks a lot like Steve Kimetko, from E!) including a voice thing? Maybe he has a mold or something.

Either way, I think the Mask this is ••••••. They actually did it kind of cool in the first movie, but in this one, it looks like they just tried to throw it in for no reason. The story could have went fine without it.

The shooting accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the characters miss a 20 foot target on foot, but easily hit a moving target on a motorcycle or in a car.

I agree with almost all of the aforementioned nits--too many masks and unbelievable kung fu, but the movie was still entertaining.

i have nits no one mentioned. it's the first one i noticed. when nyah and ethan are in the bathtub and she trips the wire (later we find out that ethan tripped it) it takes 2 seconds for the armed guards for the arrive. and for all the sercurity, nyah got to the jewels pretty easy, too easy. just up some stairs, thru the door, get in the tub and pick the lock.

another nit- when nyah car is tethering on the edge of the cliff. ethan pulls her up and they both just sit there looking into each others eyes and kissing, yeah right!!!

lastly the final fight scene took entirely to long. i think it was used to showcase mr criuse newly acquired movie talents.

i personally enjoyed the movie. but i hated the love story plot. don't get me wrong nyah (thandie newton) looked very exotic and sexy but that ethan was in love so fast, no way.

I laughed out loud when, during the duelling motorcycles scenes, both motorcycles magically switched from smooth street tires to bug nubby off-road tires when they hit the dirt! (I wish the VMax could do that!)
I thought the "love" story progressed mighty fast, too, but look at the characters. Both of them obviously don't deliberate too long about such matters...(when exactly did Nya realize she didn't want to be with a controlling, stalking criminal any longer?)
Tom Cruise should have been cast as "Neo" in the Matrix. He lifted some of the moves, and he looked better doing them.
Even with the tons of nits, I loved this movie. It was just a lot of fun.

Only a few things:

Sorry, Mr. Big-shot Scientist working for an Australian biotech firm, but that is not how we perform DNA analysis. I've done it, and it takes a lot more than just sticking a sample under a microscope. That being said, there are other ways to identify a virus, primarily just looking for it or its effects. But DNA sounds cooler.

Second, they really should have shortened the fight at the end. In the time it took them, one or the other of them should have been dead or knocked out. Period. Ethan could have avoided the whole thing by just grabbing the knife beforehand, or shooting the guy when they were doing their little motorcycle joust.

Third, that scene at the lab. There is absolutely no way that all of the people engaged in the gun battle there wouldn't have been sliced up in a million places by all the shards of broken glass flying around.

Fourth, did some of the locations in this movie remind anyone of the N64 first-person shooter Perfect Dark?

I couldn't believe that after all the explosions in the building and then a little hole gets blown in its side, that absolutely no police have arrived to investigate. You can see the street below; all is normal. If something like that happened in downtown Sydney all the emergency services and the media would be there in a frenzy?

What was with all the slo-mo shots? I felt as I was watching The Six Million Dollar Man,

Lot of masks and swapping of faces, wasn't there? Looks like director John Woo still can't get past Face/Off.

Why did they have to make Billy Baird a stereotyped Australian as seen by the rest of the world? He was played by an Australian actor; just let him be himself.

I just noticed these, for one really stood out. The "really bad guy" was getting paid 37 million pounds for Bellerephon (sp.?) and Chimera, but McCloy says after the DNA test "that's 30 million for you". Don't you think these guys would want the other 7 mill? When Luther and Billy are walking to the chopper in one scene, there is an obelisk- shaped tower in the background. Does anyone know what this is? Another thing, why would hazardous waste be kept in the bad guy's hideout, especially near the sea? When Nyah first meets the "Bad guy" a close-up shows that the scarf is wrapped cleanly around her neck, then the next shot is a view of the wind-blown scarf almost off. This next one is not really a nit, just an observation. When the scientist is walking out of the building in the opening sequence, he sees children playing and singing "ring around the rosy". This is ironic since the rhyme was written about another epidemic, the bubonic plague.

Maybe the hazardous waste is yet another operation by the bad guy: he could be getting paid to dump it into the ocean.

This movie saluted DS9 a couple of times. Bolerafon is the Intrepid-class ship Bashir traveled to Romulus in during "Inter Arm Enim Silent Leges." Also, "Chimera" was the 7th season episode with the long lost changeling, Laas.

They could just as easily have been tributes to Greco-Roman mythology.

Bellerophon was the guy who tamed Pegasus (sorry you Disnefied Hercules Fans!), and the Chimera was a three headed monster who's head types I forget.

In fact, that is exactly what they were references to, ScottN.

Braga and Moore had virtually nothing to do with this movie. The credit was nothing more than a contractual obligation.

Chimera's three heads - lion on the front, goat from the back, snake on the tail.

In what way was it a contractual obligation?

I noticed the "ring around the Rosy"-Plague ref...
it added depth to the movie.

I couldn't believe that Nyah, when she was dropped off in the middle of Sydney, and walked all the way to those cliffs. And wouldn't the bad guys have survelence on her to notice that she wasn't among the public, so she can die in front of them?

Does anyone else find it odd that this movie opened around the same time the Ramsey's passed their lie detector tests? :-)

no, why would it be?

Newt: You seriously don't get it? God, will someone whose better with words explain to him please?

sorry, Brian.

I must retarded or something. Because, I'm not getting the point.

Newt, I'm with you. I don't get why the relationship between them would be important.

Mission Impossible 2 is a big action moive with Tom cruise stopping a comspiracy about a deadly disease

The Ramseys passed a lie detector test trying to prove their innocence in their daugther's death.

I don't see the relatiionship

2 Mission: Impossibles in one week! Think about it! God, you people are thick.

I may have my head up my butt, but that is the stupidest thing I've heard in a while.

--- SPOILERS CONTAINED HEREIN ---
Ok, here we go. I almost was in denial when I saw the knobby tires on the motorcycles: "no, they couldn't be _that_ condescending to the audience, could they?" Well, they were, and that was just the start...
There's no rule that says hazardous waste is explosive, or even flammable - except someone on the set had some extra boom-stuff. And if it had exploded, there's a good chance that everyone there should be quarantined for a while.

The shot of Hunt riding through the car's flames on the bridge was so predictable that I was able to check the preceeding shots -- for a couple of the shots of the exploding car, you can't see Hunt coming - i.e. Cruise was out of the way for the explosion, then went riding through burning debris later.

I don't know who shot at what's-his-name in the back of the helicopter, but he was able to get bullet holes on either side of the 3-foot-wide opening, and miss the interior alltogether (ok, one bad guy got ONE bullet in...)

Oh, and from a financial standpoint... 2 things...
wouldn't the value of the stock plummet when the news got out that it was 's fault that the virus got loose in the first place?
And I don't care if you do buy every share of outstanding stock -- you'll never get 51% of the company that way. Companies don't allow more than 50% of the stock to be sold in the first place - for exactly that reason.

Re: cycle dueling... It looked as though the bikes got up to what 40 mph? let's say it was only 20 (they were on sand...) -- although from the sound of the motors, it sounded like 80... if two people collided chest to chest at a combined speed of 40 mph, I'm sure it would AT LEAST knock the wind out of them, if not crack ribs, hips, pelvises, skulls, jaws, knees, etc.

Yep, the last fight scene was way too long. I don't think any pro-wrestlers have the endurance needed to fight that long, and include so many flip-kick moves. Honestly, if you were in a fight for your life, would you waste time and effort spinning over and over? And if you opponent did, you'd have at least 3/4 of a second reaction time while they're airborne...
And back at the storage facility, if you went into a back flip, and kicked the gun out of someone's hand with one foot, and kicked the guy in the jaw with the other, you wouldn't have enough momentum to finish the flip (conservation of momentum).

I think I might have laughed out loud (my belated apologies to my fellow audience members) when I saw the white dove come through the burning door.

Oh, is Hunt psychic? On a few occasions he was able to predict when a bad guy was coming around a corner well enough to have his boots there at the right time.

After all that I did seem to enjoy parts of the film, especially most of the vehicle stunts (the car chase early on, the first 3rd of the motorcycle chase.)

One more thing... was the plane supposed to go down at the beginning? The pilot was a repalcement put in by the bad guys - so it could be set to 10000 ft to crash into the mountain, but then why didn't the pilot get away with the others? I thought he set the auto pilot and ran - the next I remember he was waking up in the pilot's chair, panicked and tried to save the plane from hitting.

Can anyone explain to me the aerodynamics that allows one to drop out of the belly of a plane at some-hundred miles per hour, and NOT get split in half by the edge of the opening?

OK, I think I'm done for now...

I think that the *real* captain who was supposed to be in the plane was the one found, and the guy in the ethan mask who got shot by the bad guy was the pilot that set the controls to 10000 feet.
For the people jumping through the hole, first of all they had the plane's momentum until they got out, and even if the plane was at 600 mph, that is approx. 0.00003156565657 feet per second, and gravity pulls at 32 feet per second per second.

This film did not rip-off The Matrix. Slow motion fights have always been a John Woo trademark, one that the Warchowski brothers paid homage to in The Matrix (I saw an interview somewhere).

Yes, this is me, saying I enjoyed this film. me, the man who hates Tom Cruise. Me, the man who thought the first M:I was one of the worst mvoies ever made. I admit it, I actually enjoyed this movie! What's wrong with me!?!?!?!

I get Brian's joke. The Ramseys are obviously guilty, yet they passed a polygraph! A Mission: Impossible if ever there was one. And it happened just two days after M:I 2 came out.

But I do have to say that that "head up your butt" thing was way out of line.

Um, 'scuse me, Brainy?

(600 miles/hr) x (5280 feet/mile) x (1 minute/60 seconds) x (1 hr/60 minutes) = 880 feet per second. (You divided by 3600 instead of multiplying.)

Since they started at 0 ft/sec vertically (assuming the plane was flying level) and assuming it took 0.5 second to fall out of the plane, then they were going only about 10 miles/hour (downward) when the wind cought them.

The momentum is a good point, and on further consideration, I suppose Bernoulli's principle and fluid dynamics would keep them safe until they were in free fall.

That couldn't have been that bad guy piloting the plane, since the 'pilot' was still in the plane, trying unsuccessfully to lift it above the mountains when it crashed.

Given they were in Sydney, the speedometers on the motorbikes would have been in kmh - don't know if anyone was reading them during the end bit.

I couldn't believe that with all the bullets flying around the lab, and glass busting everywhere, the computer screen with "Biocyte" display stays unharmed. (Must have the same protective force field that the actors had.)

This one had almost all the John Woo signature shots:

Birds flying amidst gunfire
LOTS of slo-mo shots
The hero sliding on the floor sideways while firing two guns
(The only one missing was the face-off, hero and villian both standing with guns pointed directly at each other's face)

This movie totally misses what made the old series great, namely suspense, and using intelligence to get out of a jam. This is turning into a James Bond parody. And didn't it seem like it lacked worldly scope and danger? Hunt is not as concerned about saving the world as he is his girlfriend.

Exactly.

The series was about the mission and how it goes down. We didn't have voice-over narration to explain every thing that happens.

This was one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. Talk about ZERO suspense. Look at all the burning questions the movie asks and then answers in the most obvious possible ways (WARNING--possible spoilers follow if you have the IQ of algae):

When hero Tom Cruise slips while rock climbing, will he fall off the cliff and die in the first two minutes of the movie? (No!) When Tom Cruise is assigned to work with the beautiful lady thief, will they end up in bed together? (Yes! Oh, yes! Oh! Oh!--oh, right, next question.) Will Tom Cruise break into the high-security building without a glitch, and will the rope retract (phew!) before the 40 seconds are up? (Why, absolutely!) Will the patented action-movie bimbo Nyah end up being used by the bad guy as a pawn to foil Tom Cruise in a thrilling showdown involving yet more guns and explosives? (Sure, why not!) Will somebody *gasp!* be infected with the dread Chimera virus? (You betcha!) Will that somebody jump off the cliff before Tom Cruise can rescue her with the antidote? (No such luck.) Will the villain get away with 30 (37?) million pounds plus stocks and live happily ever after? (Ditto.)

Bonus question: Is this female filmgoer sick of seeing airheaded woman characters introduced into action movies for the sole purpose of giving the hero a "love interest" who will invariably screw up everything and send him up a certain creek without a paddle? (You better believe it.)

Chewwie- Sorry about my miscalculation and thanks for nitpicking me. I guess i get a little pretentious sometimes.

Ethan and co. have one and only one laptop with which to track the girlfriend. It get's smashed in the explosion.
Was this hardware or software tracking, because it's a darn good thing the ONLY tracking chip wasn't damaged.

That couldn't have been that bad guy piloting the plane, since the 'pilot' was still in the plane, trying unsuccessfully to lift it above the mountains when it crashed.

Um, I saw this as: bad guy=pilot (in left seat) sets plane on a collision course and leaves; co-pilot (in right seat) wakes up and tries (unsuccessfully) to pull up.

Lots of nits for the casual observer:

So how did the IMF locate Hunt on that mountain top? And isn't it convenient that they found him just as he came to the top (or at least a level area)?

The resources of the IMF are simply amazing: they have a helicopter that only works with one laptop. . .so presumably they have a lot of these satellites. But this satellite combines both the ability to track a subtle tracer (remember, Stamp's scanner didn't pick up any emissions. . .and one assumes that Ambrose knows IMF technology) all over the world and the ability to take spy satellite-quality pictures.

Apparently, the IMF has lost all faith in their people (because of the last movie?). Remember, as soon as Hunt is contacted he is told to recruit the ex-girlfriend---so the IMF believes that Ambrose is a bad guy. And yet they trusted him when they gave him the assignment. I didn't see any reason to suspect Ambrose. In fact, consider: for Ambrose to kidnap the scientist and steal his satchel, all he has to do is take out this guy who trusts him implicitly. He meets the guy in Australia, or at the latest in Sea-Tac (I imagine that's where one would stop to get from Sidney to Atlanta by way of flying over Colorado; LAX if they had a layover in the Midwest), so he has plenty of time. He's clever; he could probably engineer it so he could avoid implicating himself. Instead, we have a complicated plot that involves finding someone who a) can fly (as competantly as an airline pilot) a large commercial jet, b) can act well enough to take the place of the real captain, and c) is willing to kill lots of people---and then introducing some kind of knockout gas into the plane's emergency air supply and parachuting out of this plane into the Rockies. Does this sound like a sensible plan when you have a man as on the inside as Ambrose was? Notice also that Ambrose's persona is blown---if he is ever recognized, the IMF will know he's a baddie (Aren't you dead?) and may go after him. Based on the available evidence, I would think the mission was blown and Ambrose died in the line of duty.

And why was the real pilot left where he could be found? As far as I could tell, his body was the only real proof that the plane accident was more than an unfortunate coincidence. Why go to all that trouble (they didn't have to kill everyone on that plane) only to leave a big clue?

That "storage facility" (at least I think it's the one that was pictured earlier in the film, when the computer guy was having trouble finding the plans to the building with the virus) was more than a little strange. It consisted of semi-finished hallways with random drums of toxic waste lying around, and lots of armed guards. Do they use hand carts to get those drums into place? And what was the hole into the facility through which Hunt exited? The whole place reminded me of a level in a first-person-shooter game. . .

NANJAO: It wasn't really clear that McCloy died (or was arrested); since he killed Dr. Nekhorvich's partner and collaborated with Ambrose, by the rules of action movie justice he should have met a grim fate. . .

NANJAO 2: The white-haired henchman of the villian is named Hugh Stamp. The name didn't really stick with me, but I kept thinking of him as Stamper. . .after the white-haired henchman of the villian in Tomorrow Never Dies.

Hunt's clothing for his infiltration of the storage facility is odd: green pants and a black top. The black doesn't seem like very good camoflage in the middle of the day on a a grassy island. The green, of course, is so you can tell him apart from the black-clad bad guys---just like the bad guys decided that one of their motorcycles should be red, so you could tell it from Ambrose's when Hunt stole it. (Note that the green pants means that Hunt changed pants with Stamp. Good thing they happened to be close enough to the same size in both waist and inseam!)

Let's think about this Chimera virus. Supposedly it's based on the flu. Why is it, then, that the only way to get it is to be injected with it? Usually the flu is airborne. Despite this, Dr. Nekhorvich is willing to travel across the world on a commercial airplane full of people, and various people hang out with Nordoff-Hall without being worried about infection. Maybe it's not communicable until after twenty hours?

Now, the plan for what to do with this virus is even stranger. The idea is that the cure, Bellerophon, is only going to be worth something if Chimera is around. McCloy even talks about this in the context of saying that, well, for most things you just get penicillin, so we need a superbug to sell the supercure. Hello? Did no one in this movie get through grade school? Antibiotics like penicillin work on some bacteria. Almost nothing but white blood cells directly targets and destroys viruses (as Bellerophon is shown to do in this movie). Bellerophon is a big deal, whether it is needed to cure a modern plague or not.

At the races, Nordoff-Hall gets an two-way radio which she places in her ear. Watch her hair: intially it falls to screen her ear (cleverly hiding the radio), but in subsequent shots her hair shows at least two different arrangments of hair-swept-over-ear or ear-poking-through-hair---even though her head is more or less fixed as she looks at Hunt! (which is a dangerous thing to do, anyway---Ambrose knows well what Hunt looks like, Hunt is undisguised, and yet the two lovebirds are busy gazing at each other!)

So why did Dr. Nekhorvich inject himself with the Chimera virus? There was something about smuggling it in, but if he can get a vial of Bellerophon through he can get a vial of Chimera thorugh.
Customs Official: So what's this vial of green stuff?
Dr. N: A genetically engineered anti-viral agent.
Customs Agent: Okay. What about this other vial?
Dr. N: A genetically engineered influenza virus.
Customs Agent: Now just hold on, buddy!

And when he injected himself with the virus he no doubt punched several small holes in one of the gloves in the glove box; did he bother to tell anyone, or was Hunt taking a bigger risk than he knew when he used that glove box?

Hunt destroyed the samples of Chimera, but how useful was that? McCoy's flunky confirms that Ambrose really does have Chimera by comparing it to the known DNA sequence for Chimera. Since a virus is mostly just DNA and RNA, how hard would it be to recreate Chimera from that known sequence?

There is some concern expressed between Stamp and Ambrose over whether Nordoff-Hall is an IMF plant. Notice that this happens after she has been brought to their headquarters. Review: Hunt had found her and, indeed, set her up (in Spain) within perhaps twenty-four hours of getting the self-destructing message (in Utah). She arranged to be in police custody, knowing that Ambrose would instantly spring her (how he could do that, given that he was supposed to be dead, is unclear). Why would she have to be anything but sincere? Apparently the IMF can capture her at will---if they had just given her to the police, anticipating Ambrose's next move, surely they could have tracked her even without her coooperation or knowledge. Wouldn't it have been bright for Stamp and Ambrose to think of these things before she arrives at your secret hideout?

I realize that Hunt is a Good Guy, and therefore not allowed to shoot anyone, even Bad Guys, in the back, but why did he, when disguised as Stamp, just grab the Bellerophon and run without doing anything to slow down the numerous bad guys in the room (who were all ignoring him)? Of course, if he'd been carrying a knockout gas grenade he wouldn't have had the fun of a car chase. . .

Hunt conveniently had his watch set up to do a twenty-hour countdown when Nordoff-Hall injects herself. a) What kind of watch has the capability to do a twenty-hour countdown? Or have I been using Timex too long, and this is a really common feature on high-end digital watches? b) Wouldn't it have made more sense for his watch to be displaying the time, since he needed that information for the break-in? c) Oddly enough, I don't recall subsetequent close-ups of the watch to tell us how much time he had left.

At one point in the storage facility Hunt tosses a pipe bomb toward a door, and then detonates it by shooting it. Did he just feel like showing off his marksmanship? (This was when I really started getting a Duke Nukem sensation.) A few minutes later he pulls out a regular hand grenade; wouldn't that have made more sense than whole throw pipe bomb-shoot pipe bomb thing?

Why did Hunt have to jump off the helicopter into the atrium exactly when he did? Sure, he was on a schedule, but would it hurt to wait a few more seconds at that stage? (He could have hurried more once he got down there.) The roof vents were not open; going splat on them would not help

Ambrose predicted exactly what and when Hunt would do to destroy Chimera in the lab, but didn't do anything to get there early (granted, he brought along Nordoff-Hall. . .and had someone plant a bomb on Stickell's van a few minutes later (and leave without finishing the kill. . .hmm)). If Hunt had spent a few fewer seconds having flashbacks (largely to events he had not seen) before destoying the last Chimera, it would have been toast before Ambrose got there.

Hunt conveniently had his watch set up to do a twenty-hour countdown when Nordoff-Hall injects herself. a) What kind of watch has the capability to do a twenty-hour countdown? Or have I been using Timex too long, and this is a really common feature on high-end digital watches? b) Wouldn't it have made more sense for his watch to be displaying the time, since he needed that information for the break-in? c) Oddly enough, I don't recall subsetequent close-ups of the watch to tell us how much time he had left.

A buddy of mine had a mid-quality digital watch that could be set to do a countdown, it's not as common as having a stop-watch feature but it's not exactly a rare thing to have either.

This movie had an airing on Showtime a day after its broadcast premiere on CBS, and numerous pay-cable runs on Showtime and The Movie Channel after that. Ain't corporate synergy grand?

Whatever the faults of this movie, Hans Zimmer turns in another good score, especially his piece entitled 'Injection'.

Maybe he just set the alarm on his watch.

Well, since M:I3 is coming out, I thought I had to look at this one again because I barely recalled anything about it. Now I remember why... I didn't want to peruse all the previous comments before getting my impressions down. I glanced at a few and apparently others disliked it as much or more than I did.

Within the first 20 minutes I realized just how much I now hate John Woo movies. This one would have been 20 minutes shorter without all the slow motion shots. And the non-sequitur cuts in the middle of a fight scene. Banana.

I have to admit the gal was absolutely beautiful. I liked her more than most of the Bond girls.

This is one of the worst action movies of high quality I've ever seen.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the annoying "toilet-bowl cam", where the camera POV swirls around the subject. In slow motion.

It's not that often that I shout "BULLSH(ock)!!" unbidden at a movie, but some things in this one were so totally unbelievable as to be preposterous.