Mission: Impossible 2

The concept behind the Mission: Impossible movies is enticing: Take a great director, a modern master of technique and thrills, and put him behind the wheel of a big-budget Tom Cruise movie — Brian De Palma directed the first one in 1996, and now John Woo has helmed Mission: Impossible 2. Well, it looks good on paper, anyway. Cruise, the co-producer of these movies as well as the star, seems to lose track of the reason he hired these directors in the first place. In scattered moments you get flashes of the old De Palma or Woo genius — not quite enough to sustain you, but just enough to frustrate you.

Mission: Impossible 2, I’m afraid, is yet another stubbornly incomprehensible spy thriller very much in the James Bond mold. In these movies, which are pointless to synopsize in any detail, the good guy must prevent the bad guy from acquiring something deadly or powerful. That’s it. That’s all they’re about. There is usually also an attractive woman, whom the good guy must also prevent the bad guy from acquiring, and sometimes she’s deadly or powerful. But not enough, of course, to shadow the hero. Oh, and there are stunts, and lots of meaningless running around, and lots more meaningless exposition about the meaning of all this meaninglessness, and yet more stunts.

Cruise’s superspy hero, Ethan Hunt, must stop evil renegade agent Dougray Scott before he can infect the population of Sydney, Australia with a lethal virus. The villain’s plan is to create a demand for the virus’ antidote, which he can then supply, for an immodest fee. Ethan sends his new lady love Thandie Newton, who was once involved with the villain, to go back to him so she can spy on him. Since Cruise and Newton have zero chemistry together, we’re not especially moved by Ethan’s turmoil and jealousy when his lover ends up back in his enemy’s arms.

Watching a cluttered, dawdling “adventure” like Mission: Impossible 2, you may flash back on the relatively trim and straightforward Indiana Jones movies, which had just as much globe-trotting and a plot identical to the one I described in the paragraph before last, but which also had pace and momentum. M:I2 founders and drags — the middle third is incredibly dull — and that’s a shocker coming from John Woo, who’s usually an artist of propulsive, balletic violence. In earlier movies, Woo’s patented slow-mo passages — Sam Peckinpah buffed to a gleaming shine — riveted our attention and forged beauty out of chaos. Here, Woo just seems to fall back on slow-mo whenever he gets bored, which apparently is often. The movie is never bad to look at — Woo knows where to put the camera — but it’s hollowly attractive. Even Woo’s signature dove is just a sad grace note here, a reminder of better films.

Tom Cruise may enjoy throwing himself into the sleek physicality of these movies, but it doesn’t do much for me. Ethan Hunt remains a cipher, a wind-up action figure who can do damn near anything short of flying. In the outlandish finale, he even does a little of that. The climax is admittedly a jolt of caffeine — it’s as if Woo were finally, finally being let out to play after being locked inside Robert Towne’s pedestrian script for two hours, and he cuts loose. The stunts and collisions here, like the best moments in De Palma’s film, get you laughing at their kinetic daffiness. But it’s too little, too late. Towards the end, some members of the audience didn’t even wait till fade-out to head for the aisle; others left silently when it was over, and the audience throughout the film, indeed, was mostly silent. Mission: Impossible 2 doesn’t give us a whooping good time; most of it feels static and self-indulgent. Cruise himself seems to be having a blast, kicking and whirling in the fresh air and sunshine; too bad he forgot to let the rest of us in on his fun.

Hamlet (2000)

This is undoubtedly the first screen rendition of Hamlet in which “Blockbuster Clerk” appears among the character names in the credits. Shakespeare, of course, failed to write any dialogue for the mute Blockbuster Clerk; in an equally stunning failure, he neglected to set any scenes in a laundromat, as this new movie does. Lest any of this sound ridiculous — a youth-chasing MTV Bard spectacle á la 1996′s Romeo + Juliet — bear in mind that this Hamlet, directed on the cheap by Michael Almereyda, is in its own way as honorable and serious an attempt as Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. True, it’s also not completely successful, but then neither was Branagh’s version, which pointlessly included the pointless bits of the play in its thirst to film everything. This new Hamlet tosses out scenes by the dozen, and works quite well as a stripped-down, modern-dress vision of Shakespeare.

We’re in “New York, 2000,” where the young Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) slouches around in a haze of depression and contempt. His father (Sam Shepard), the CEO of Manhattan’s thriving Denmark Corporation, has just died, and his mother Gertrude (Diane Venora) has jumped quite happily — too happily — into the arms of his uncle, Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan). Hawke, moping fashionably into the camera, turns out to be a feasible melancholy Dane for this uptown Hamlet. Hawke doesn’t get Kenneth Branagh’s dynamism, but Branagh didn’t get Hawke’s nihilistic despair. Put the two together and you might have the perfect Hamlet (who is said to be perhaps the most unplayable character ever written — an actor is lucky to get a bit of it down). Hawke’s Hamlet also makes artsy videos (of himself and others), which we see a lot of, and which I could’ve done with a little less of.

Almereyda (who made the experimental vampire film Nadja) and his cinematographer John de Borman walk the line between sleek and grungy; they seem equally at home in Claudius’ well-groomed offices and in Hamlet’s VHS-littered pit. At first, as always, it’s a bit jarring to hear Shakespeare’s words coming from people in modern dress, and when Claudius makes his first speech he waves a copy of that morning’s USA Today, with a blaring cover story on Fortinbras. (Even the eagle-eyed may not identify Fortinbras as Ben Affleck’s brother Casey.) But none of it comes across as gimmicky; the movie is almost playful in its mission to burrow around inside Hamlet and discover what’s still relevant about it.

Some of the actors are playful, too. Bill Murray’s reading of Polonius’ famous advice is a little too recitatory — he reminded me of when I had to memorize it for school and rattled it off to a bored teacher — but when he sends Laertes off with “The time invites you. Go!”, it sounds like pure Murray; he could almost be saying “Geddouda here, ya nut.” Kyle MacLachlan and Diane Venora make a great, glittering dark couple, devoted to the pleasures of the rich. (Claudius belongs in a limo with tinted windows.) Julia Stiles is a fine, sullen Ophelia — she and Hamlet are the Prozac twins — and comes up with an amazing breakdown scene at the Guggenheim. Even the raffish Steve Zahn (Out of Sight) turns up as a party-boy Rosencrantz; he’s incongruously terrific, as is Paula Malcomson as “Marcella” (yes, Horatio’s soldier acquaintance has had a sex change).

Hamlet drives steadily and forcefully to its traditionally bloody conclusion, in which Hamlet and Laertes (Liev Schreiber gives a surprisingly imposing performance) duel it out; Almereyda manages to toss in a gun on top of the usual swords and poison. Before that, there’s a nicely telescoped scene in which Hamlet, in lieu of having a band of players enact his guilt-inducing play, puts together his own video pastiche pointing a finger at the murderer of his father. This video, unlike the other Hamlet snippets we’ve seen, has genuine power; what could have been artsy and pretentious instead cuts to the quick. By and large, the same is true of Almereyda’s movie.

Gladiator (2000)

Political junkies may be amused by Gladiator, the burly and boring new epic directed by Ridley Scott. This, after all, is the story of a former warrior who has a chance at ruling his land, until the spoiled son of royalty brings him low. The film even features a noble senator who wants to boot the son of royalty out of power. Read Gladiator as the John McCain story and you might stay interested in it for a while.

It’s not often that a movie exists on several levels of rip-off. Gladiator doesn’t only remind you of earlier, better sword-and-sandal sagas like Spartacus and Ben-Hur. When the hero, the great Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe), narrowly escapes assassination and returns home to find his wife and son brutally slain, you half expect mad Maximus to jump into a modified police car and run down some Aussie motorcycle punks. And the hate-athon between Maximus and Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), the unworthy blood heir to the throne of Caesar, has a distinct Ten Commandments whiff about it: Maximus/Moses is the superior son that Caesar/Pharoah wishes he had instead of getting stuck with Commodus/Rameses.

Critics have also compared the early battle sequence in Gladiator to the early battle sequence in Saving Private Ryan, with which any reasonable filmgoer must beg to differ. The key difference is that, for all its jerky camera movements and shutter-angle reduction for a sped-up, strobe effect, the Saving Private Ryan sequence was actually possible to follow. Ridley Scott uses the same technique — he had actually used it before in his inept G.I. Jane, so I can’t say he’s swiping from Spielberg — but the editing is so ferocious, the action filmed so close in, and the lighting so punishingly dim, that you literally can’t tell what’s going on. This also goes for the scenes inside the Coliseum, when Maximus returns to Rome as a slave and gladiator bent on vengeance. He kills lots of opponents, I guess — who can tell?

You know you’re not in for a subtle evening at the movies when the hero is named Maximus, which sounds like a brand of condom. Russell Crowe does his best to breathe life into this bronze statue of a character, and it’ll be a deep irony if, after years of complex performances in box-office failures like L.A. Confidential and The Insider, this stoic beefcake role is the one that puts him over the top. Joaquin Phoenix, by virtue of having fun with his rotten Commodus and sharing the fun with us, skitters away with the movie. When a movie hero is this opaque, one’s interest naturally shifts to the decadent villain and the actor enjoying playing him.

Has Ridley Scott lost it? Gladiator is one of the worst-looking movies ever made by a former visual genius. The Coliseum, mostly created in a computer and populated by crowds also created in a computer, is compelling proof that CGI has a long way to go. Scott even uses CGI on poor Oliver Reed, who died during filming; a stand-in with Reed’s digitally mapped face plays Reed’s final scene. It looks okay, but subliminally there is still something off about it — I couldn’t focus on a word the fake Reed was saying.

Gladiator marches grimly to its conclusion; three screenwriters can’t add much spice to this reheated beef stew. If a gladiator film doesn’t work as spectacle or as bloodthirsty action, what’s left? Drama? It’s dead on that level, too, unless you haven’t seen Braveheart or even Hamlet, from which the climactic fight borrows. Gladiator is a monument to meat-eating retro masculinity — I can imagine the guys on The Man Show raving about it — but that’s finally all it is. It will be amusing, though, to listen to all the guys talk about how much they loved Gladiator while avoiding the uncomfortable subtext of why they loved it.