Mission: Impossible II (2000) First Time Watching! Full Movie Reaction!!
Added 2026-01-12 16:30:02 +0000 UTC
Comments
Tom Crooze hahaha the laughs at the end were perfection! Oh, woah! What luck for Hugh Jackman! -Sam
TBR Schmitt
2026-01-17 06:40:02 +0000 UTCLOVE IT!! So excited for the next installment! -Sam
TBR Schmitt
2026-01-17 06:36:37 +0000 UTCWe haven't seen the rest yet so can't really say, but it is much different than the first! I stopped reading after your spoiler alert (thank you), but will need to circle back after we've finished! -Sam
TBR Schmitt
2026-01-17 06:35:34 +0000 UTCAww thanks so much!! Thanks for the recommendation! More Woo and more Van Damme sounds like a great next entry for them both! Excited for the next one! -Sam
TBR Schmitt
2026-01-17 06:34:06 +0000 UTCDefinitely a ton of recommendations for more John Woo! -Sam
TBR Schmitt
2026-01-17 06:33:28 +0000 UTCI believe they said they have when someone asked previously.
Forrest
2026-01-16 18:42:50 +0000 UTCHave The Schmitts seen Braveheart (1995)?
YoureMrLebowski
2026-01-14 19:53:43 +0000 UTCYou know it's a John Woo film when there's birds involved. XD Tom Cruise's hair has never looked better in this film.
EdmanXERO
2026-01-14 00:24:00 +0000 UTCJohn Woo's classic Hong Kong films, such as Hard Boiled, The Killer and A Better Tomorrow, had been hard to see in the U.S. for a number of years due to a rights issue. However, newly remastered versions have just been released on bluray and various streaming services. Christopher McQuarrie did an excellent job on the later films in the series but I kind of missed the original idea of having a different director with a unique style for each entry.
Brad P
2026-01-13 09:24:12 +0000 UTCA reaction as fun as the film! I'm glad you enjoyed part 2 as much as I do. If you're prepared to go along with John Woo's insanity, almost everything he does is so much fun. If you want another Woo that's very, very similar in style and over-the-top nuts action, definitely watch Hard Target (1993) with Van Damme! I really can't wait for MI 3. I think it will be your favourite of the 3 so far. It's got so much going for it!
Future Boy
2026-01-13 09:10:36 +0000 UTCI kinda enjoy MI #2, but I always treat it as less of an MI adventure and more of a film starring Jason Statham or Van Damme. There's also a little of James Bond in it, with the Bond girl (Thandie Newton) and the sneering Scottish villain (Dougray Scott). BTW, while re-watching the whole film series, I find all of them rollicking good fun, action-adventure stuff, but I can't help but find some symbolic aspects of the later MI films really, really weird. In MI #2, there's a little hint of the 'Ethan Hunt is a saint' symbolism, with his outstretched arms on the cliffs mirroring the cross seen at the Festival of Saints in Saville. [SMALL SPOILER ALERT HERE] But in later films, characters say such odd over-the-top things about Ethan Hunt, including that he is 'the living manifestation of destiny' or 'the incarnation of chaos'. Ethan Hunt, naturally, dies and comes back to life multiple times. The whole series is terrific fun, but these strange script choices pull me out of the enjoyment of seeing Tom Cruise jumping off high places, each film escalating from one height to another, to the point that Hunt cabling down from the ceiling in MI #1 seems overly quaint.
Michael SCH
2026-01-13 02:27:07 +0000 UTCShe did comment on Ambrose's misogyny but only rolled her eyes at Hopkins' line.
Tyler Foster
2026-01-13 00:13:08 +0000 UTCIf Woo hadn't directed this one, 70% of everything I love about it would not be in it!
Future Boy
2026-01-13 00:11:27 +0000 UTCI'll take any more John Woo i can get, but I've got a real thing for Hard Target. It's my favourite John Woo and my favourite Jean Claude Van Damme. Totally silly but so much fun.
Future Boy
2026-01-13 00:06:55 +0000 UTCNo comment on the somewhat low grade misogyny in the two different lines about women? I just find it interesting that this innocuous action film would include two literal putdowns about women. Back in the day I guess it was a little bit more accepted but in 2025 /2026 it's a different story; these stand out to me like a sore thumb.
Michael Nemo
2026-01-12 22:17:03 +0000 UTCI love that you guys are watching this franchise. The movies get better as you go on. One thing about this series the only thing you can expect is that it really is an impossible mission.
Queenofd_nile
2026-01-12 21:02:36 +0000 UTCI've always called this one Kickin' Impossible but it might be Maskin' Impossible. John Woo was not thr right choice for director, but I still enjoyed rewatching this for the first time in 25 years!
Allen S.
2026-01-12 19:45:06 +0000 UTCBen Stiller did this funny video with Tom Cruise for the MTV movie awards. It would've gone viral if viral was a thing in 2000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5d7QLr7lGQ Also fun fact. Dougray Scott who plays the villain in this movie was originally cast as Wolverine in the first X-Men movie. Filming went long on MI2 so he had to drop out and at the last minute they cast the virtually unknown Hugh Jackman. It's a huge "what if". I doubt we would've got 20 years of Wolverine movies or maybe Hugh Jackman doesn't become a movie star.
Ellie Williams
2026-01-12 19:26:42 +0000 UTCGiven the fact that you guys liked this so much, even though I've said it before (including on the schedule post yesterday), you have to dive into more John Woo. Woo became famous as an action filmmaker in Hong Kong before making the switch to Hollywood in the early '90s, where he made a string of action movies before finally returning to Hong Kong. These days, he works only occasionally but will happily do so in either HK or America. The two pillars of his Hong Kong days are The Killer (1989) and Hard-Boiled (1992), both of which star Chow Yun-Fat from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In America, I would say the two most essential films are Hard Target (1993), his first Hollywood movie (on which he was assisted and protected from meddling studio executives by none other than producer Sam Raimi, who Woo has enthusiastically called a friend ever since), and Face/Off (1997). I know I keep bringing up the fact that it lost some poll on here by like one vote, but that is truly one of the greatest action movies ever made, and if you don't already know what it's about, keep it that way, because you will go on an unbelievable ride. If you loved the slow-mo, over-the-top, melodramatic action cheese, you'll have a blast with all four of these movies. Speaking of Woo, the doves are a Woo trademark. He is famous for putting doves in his movies, so much so that if you look at the fiery theatrical poster for the movie, they even put in the shadowy silhouette of a dove near the bottom as a hat-tip to Woo. You can keep an eye out for the doves if you get to the other four Woo films I mentioned. Another thing I mentioned on the schedule post but will elaborate on a bit here is that Woo is a huge fan of classic Hollywood, including musicals and Alfred Hitchcock movies. He put his love for two specific Hitchcock films into this, blending the plots of Notorious (1946), about a civilian recruited to be a spy to suss out a Nazi in hiding, and To Catch a Thief (1955), in which a thief is recruited to catch a cat burglar stealing rich people's jewelry. Although the M:I series ultimately establishes itself as more of a present-day tech-forward thrill franchise, and M:I-2 is often cited as feeling out-of-step with the others, there is a logic to the movies it was drawing on. It isn't until the fourth Mission: impossible that they became famous for Tom Cruise's stunts specifically, but they did do stunts for real on the first three. Cruise hanging from the ceiling is, of course, a stunt, just more of an acrobatic one about balance and endurance than an unbelievable feat. He also shot the scene in the restaurant with all the fish tanks for real. There are many great stunts in this one, but one of the craziest real ones that many may not even think of as a stunt (either because they don't process the logistics of it or assume it's trickery) is the knife in the eye. The trick: a structure, probably shaped sort of like a stool with four legs and a flat top, with a knife attached to a cable that hung down underneath the flat top from an unbreakable cable that could hold several tons of weight, or something to that effect. This structure allowed a stuntperson to hold onto the knife with Cruise lying underneath it, and then the stuntperson could throw their entire weight into the knife to bring it down, and the cable and the strength of the structure would guarantee that the knife stopped at a terrifyingly short distance from Cruise's eye. One...fun (?) fact about this movie is that it arguably changed the entire history of comic book movies, and arguably the industry forever -- for all we know, this chain of events indirectly helped the MCU exist. Because the shoot for this movie ran long, actor Dougray Scott (who played the villain, Sean Ambrose) had to drop out of his next film due to scheduling conflicts, allowing the second choice to take the role. That second choice was Hugh Jackman, who got the gig playing Wolverine in the first X-Men (2000), the movie that really made comic book movies successful (at the time they were considered a risk with many failures and only the occasional success, like the 1978 Superman or 1989 Batman to show for it), a role he's still playing today. Also, I forgot to mention it, but makeup on the first M:I was done by the legendary prosthetics and makeup effects artist Rob Bottin, who is most famous for his work on The Thing (1982). You guys asked about series at the end of 2025, so series are clearly part of your focus for this year, so another franchise that was also famous for having entries that were all like the director came in and put their own stamp on it was the first four Alien movies. As with most channels, you stopped with Aliens (which itself illustrated this by switching from full-on horror to something more like action-suspense), but my favorite Alien movie (yes, yes...blasphemy to some) is the "Special Edition" or "Assembly Cut"/"Workprint" of Alien³ (1992), which you can watch on Prime if you look for the Special Edition, and I've also come to love the theatrical cut of Alien: Resurrection (1997) in a similar way to this, warts and all. No slouches in the hiring department either: Alien³ was the feature directorial debut of David Fincher (even though he disowned it, quitting the project before it was finished; the version I'm recommending is the last version of the movie he turned in before quitting and thus most closely represents what he wanted to do before he left) and Resurrection was -- as is no doubt your first, and perhaps only guess -- Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of Amélie.
Tyler Foster
2026-01-12 19:22:45 +0000 UTC
