Mission: Impossible II

2000, US, directed by John Woo

Chosen purely because it was on the hospital television when we needed a distraction, the title was inadvertently appropriate: my wife was making slow progress through her second very long labour (a mere eighteen hours on the official clock, though we thought the hospital was ungenerous in that regard). The high-water mark for John Woo's American career, the camera operators got quite the workout here, what with Woo's penchant for filming destruction from multiple angles and at multiple speeds. Even at the time, the conjunction between aspects of Woo's Hong Kong aesthetic and the slickness of a Hollywood superproduction was incongruous, though one of the successes of the MI franchise is certainly the sense that each film has a distinct visual identity -- unlike, say, the Bond films, at least until the most recent phase of that franchise.